I think the point of the article is that the professor assumed that the over-representation of Ivy League grads would be significantly higher than it is. At the end of the day, to me, it’s a moot point. The overwhelming majority of students, regardless of where they attend school, aren’t going to be CEO’s or Supreme Court justices.
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The more I think about it, in a perfect world, on this board we would stop using the words “prestige” and “prestigious.” Many people react negatively to these terms. It is as if these words represent magical thinking and intangibles. People compare the ‘prestige’ of different institutions with wildly different criteria.
I think using “selective” would be better. No one can argue that Princeton is more selective than Boise State. There is no gray area here. The appreciation of passing the bar for a “selective” institution is pretty much universally respected. Look at the reverence for FAANG in this thread. If you get a job at one of those organizations, there is a high likelihood you are bright and competent. How do we know this? Because of their selectivity.
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I think these “overrepresentation” results you are noting are largely the product of three things.
First, the sorts of people who successfully pursued highly selective college admissions are more often the sorts of people who end up following all the steps necessary to then pursue highly selective graduate and professional school admissions, or highly selective employment positions.
Second, to the extent there are non-school factors involved (things like standardized tests, networking, and so on), the sorts of people who successfully pursued highly selective college admissions are more often the sorts of people who will do well in those factors too.
Third, I do think highly selective schools and employers will often go deeper into the classes of highly selective colleges, on the theory that is an appropriate adjustment for the level of competition that those applicants faced.
Again, I am personally skeptical that terms like “prestige” really help explain any of this. But, I think it is true, say, that a highly selective school or employer might well tend to take people from the top third of college A, top 10% of college B, top 1-2 individuals at college C, and so on.
But not because they see A as more “prestigious” than B and B as more “prestigious” than C. Rather, they see A as more selective/competitive than B, and B as more selective/competitive than C. And they are thinking something like that the person who was able to be in the top third of A could have been top 10% at B and top 1 or 2 at C.
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So you think these companies outsourced part of their selection processes to college adcoms?
I think there are two separate questions:
- Does college prestige matter to employers/grad schools? (The topic of this thread)
- Do prestigious colleges produce more successful students? (What you’re pointing out)
1 → as discussed in other posts here, it varies by career/field.
2 → I believe they do, and for the reasons I posted earlier about Princeton, but which apply to other similarly prestigious schools:
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Wouldn’t that be effectively what employers hiring based on college prestige are doing?
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At a place like Princeton, I believe the nature of education is also different in some ways. Even in pre-professional fields like CS, a lot of the instruction is not vocational. There is significant emphasis on theory. Kids are required to read research on a weekly basis in many courses. Some (perhaps many here) may view this as a negative. Because kids are not trained in practical things. Indeed some kids on campus also don’t like this approach. But I believe this approach lets kids walk into interviews without excessive preparation, figure things out on the fly from first principles etc. I believe, and I am told, that several of the name brand privates ( and only a very small number of the publics) are inclined this way, at least in CS. I guess CS is one of the few areas where the choice is possible. In traditional engg fields everyone leans a bit more practical (even here Princeton leans more towards theory). My son was assigned reading of papers that were literally three months old in some courses. Certainly in areas like Biology it is common place to be assigned reading that is 1-3 years old. I suspect some employers value this more than others. Likely the bigger employers like the FAANG care more . Because they want the kids to understand the complexity deeply before making changes.
Agreed. That’s what I said. Very smart kids + rigorous education + excellent opportunities = very successful outcomes.
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So you think these companies outsourced part of their selection processes to college adcoms?
That way of putting it seems to be implying they would believe the college had applied the same criteria they would, and that is not quite the attitude I have seen.
It is more something like this. You are in the faculty of a top graduate program in English, and participating in admissions to your highly-selective PhD program. You are looking at two applicants, one who went to Penn and majored in English, and one who went to Penn State and majored in English. Both have all As in their English courses, and both have recommendations stating they are among the top few English majors in their class.
As an aside, I note that the English professors at Penn and Penn State providing these recommendations all went to top PhD programs themselves, because that is how it works–the PhDs from the top few English programs are killing each other to get a placement like Penn State, let alone Penn.
OK, so I don’t think that if you were in that position, you would believe the college admissions committees of Penn and Penn State had applied criteria directly relevant to admissions to your highly-selective English PhD program. Because no mere HS graduate could meet those criteria.
However, you might well select the person from Penn over the person from Penn State. Not because Penn is more “prestigious”, but rather because you think that it is notably harder to get all As and be one of the top few English students at Penn. And you (might) think that in part because Penn is a lot more selective than Penn State. But again, you are not thinking that you, say, value HS grades and SAT/ACTs or so on. You just think it means more to compete so successfully against other Penn English majors versus other Penn State English majors.
Or maybe you are doing admissions for a highly-selective law school. Now you really don’t so much care about the English-specific stuff, but you might still go deeper into the Penn class generally than the Penn State class (which will pull in a variety of majors). Again, not because you think the college admissions criteria they used is directly relevant–I mean, you can require the LSAT if you think it would be helpful, you don’t need to use proxies for the SAT/ACT. But rather, you might think someone with very good but not perfect grades at Penn has proven as much or more about their likely success in law school as someone with perfect grades at Penn State.
That sort of thing.
Note I am not trying to justify this. I just think based on everything I have read and experienced, this is a better model of what these people are usually thinking than some generic “prestige” factor. They are more just mentally adjusting what it means to have succeeded at a certain level in college, based on their perceptions of how competitive that college environment was.
The data is definitely in favor of Ivy School grads for Supreme Court Clerkships. However, if placement into Supreme Court clerkship undergraduate feeder schools is a measure, then one would need to put Hillsdale on some kind of list since they recently had 3 of the 30 or so clerks in the 2021 term entering cohort. Pretty good for a school which is ranked 48th of the liberal arts schools by US News.
Hillsdale alumni clerk for US Supreme Court this term - Hillsdale Collegian.
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May that not be because of its political orientations? Not many ideological Republicans that graduate Ivies.
Also they went to elite law schools (2 went to UChicago Law, 1 went to Yale Law) which is supposed to be more important.
(Sorry, I’m not a parent)
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This. I will never forget, as a 1L in a top 15 school, telling my ConLaw professor that I aspired to be on the Supreme Court one day. And he laughed. Like, full-body, serious laugh. He told me that if that was my goal, I was at the wrong school. He was right (if a touch rude).
That said, my school absolutely helped me get a job out of law school, not just because if its relative prestige but because it had an extensive on-campus interview program that made job hunting very easy.
But it’s different depending on where you live and where you want to practice. In my current state (where I maintain licensure but admittedly have never practiced), the legal profession seems very clubby and tightly tied to alumni networks for the in-state law schools. If one of my kids were to decide they want to be a lawyer and stay in this state, I’d advise them to go to school here rather than a potentially higher “prestige” school out of state.
Jd Vance, Ron Desantis…where exactly is there a shortage of ideological Republicans from Yale?
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I think you are capturing something real. I did not attend Princeton, but attended a top ranked LAC known for rigor where I was a biology major. We read and discussed recently published papers on a regular basis. Few classes ever had textbooks. A typical exam would involve being asked to design a study that could elucidate a certain question. I don’t believe I ever took a multiple choice test the entire time I was there.
The difference in the education was apparent to me during the recent controversy about the O-Chem professor from NYU (a former Princeton prof) whose contract wasn’t renewed. In multiple articles, O-Chem was described as a class requiring extensive memorization. This was not my experience at all. O-Chem, in my experience, was 100% problem solving. I don’t believe I memorized anything (except for poetry) in college. I was well prepared enough that there was no need to study for the MCAT. When I got to med school, I found it to be intellectually easy (emotionally and physically hard, but the academic content didn’t take much effort.) My former classmates felt the same. My sister, in contrast, attended a non-selective regional private for undergrad. She had no trouble getting into med school, but once there was in for a shock as she found it much more difficult than undergrad. However, I will note that both of us are successful doctors now…
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My 8th grade kid wanted to sit on the Supreme Court. This seems to be a surprisingly common affliction :-). That summer he took a con law course at a nearby LAC (meant for their seniors), missed a week of classes out of the 6 weeks and got an A-. He was susbscribed to law review journals etc that year and the next.
I told him that when he is 40 or 42, there should be an opening on the court, and the president should be of the same political leaning as him, and his kind should not be over represented on the court etc. I told him to drop the idea and not to have unreasonable goals.
Wouldn’t that be effectively what employers hiring based on college prestige are doing?
So as noted in another post I don’t think that is likely what most highly-selective schools and employers are actually doing. Here is one practical difference.
Suppose it is true a given employer will tend to hire out of the top third at college A, and only out of the top 10% at college B.
OK, so you get into both A and B. If you want to get that job some day, and so go to college A.
You then fail to make it into the top third of your class at A. And others from college A get that job, but not you.
In these circumstances, going to college A ended up doing absolutely nothing to help you get that job. Indeed, it is possible you would have been better off going to college B, at least if you would have had a chance to be top 10% at B. Although you have to be careful with that kind of thinking, because these days plenty of people are gaming this out in the same way . . . .
Anyway, the point is whatever criteria A used to admit you, and whatever “prestige” advantage you think A might have over B, ended up doing nothing to help you get this job, because you failed to be in the top third of your class at A.
So my feeling is using terms like “prestige” is hurting more than it is helping when it comes to effects like this. Meaning I definitely believe it can mean more to some employers if you make it to a certain level of success in A, versus attaining similar levels of success at B. But that is not because they think A is more prestigious, it is because they think A is more competitive. And all that won’t help you get that job if you don’t actually do well in that competition at A.
As a final thought–I think it can be tough to convince kids who are used to always being at or very near the top of their school classes that they are at serious risk of not being, say, at least top third in their highly-selective college class. Of course that is basically pure math–way more than one-third of their highly-selective college class will be similarly accomplished pre-college, and therefore it is mathematically necessary that many will experience, for the first time, not being one of the best students.
So, I personally think a lot of the “prestige” talk is basically brushing off the fact that going to a highly-selective college may not get you your desired next position if you don’t do well enough at that college. Even if these high-achievers-so-far recognize that is a theoretical possibility, they simply don’t think it could possibly happen to them. But, by necessity, it will happen to many of them.
Within this A and B framework, there will be jobs available for the top 1-5% of A that won’t be available for students from B. This is the tails discussion above.
As an example, there was a kid some 3 years ago who just looked at the dorm room lottery results and said the system was flawed. The university went back and checked their algorithm and discovered bugs in their system. He had a new grad offer between 700k and 1mm/yr.
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I would have to say computing is low. After about 3 years experience, employers don’t even ask where you went to school…because they don’t care.
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Within this A and B framework, there will be jobs available for the top 1-5% of A that won’t be available for students from B. This is the tails discussion above.
Agreed. Like, in the framework I used above, there was a top-third A, top 10% B, top 1-2 individuals C. But there are then colleges D and so forth where virtually no one ever gets that position.
OK, and then for the most highly selective positions, there might be a top 5% at A, top 1-2 individuals at B, and virtually no one from C or D or so forth.
Now, of course if you are talking about positions like that, you should understand that almost no matter how good of a HS student you have been, the odds are against you getting to that level at A, or indeed B, because there are almost always way too many HS students as good as you who are going to be in that competition. A few individuals are exceptions, meaning even as of HS you knew they were going to easily be top of the class whatever college they choose (barring extraneous factors), but they are truly rare.
But I also think part of the appeal for ambitious HS students of choosing A, or at least B, over C, is that you at least have a shot at it. And then more realistically, you only have to be top-third at A, or top 10% at B, to get a really quite good placement. And so on, really–the middle third at A might well have better placements on average than the middle third at B, and similar for B versus C.
And this is surely how these schools can stay so selective. The small chance at a top placement probably wouldn’t be enough on its own. But the fact you can still do quite well in the middle third, say, is a nice backup plan.
Really the only people I worry about being ill-served by their college choice is the ones who end up near the bottom of their classes. A lot can be involved in that besides college choice, of course. But I do think some people just end up poorly-suited for the sorts of competition they end up facing, and they might well have been better off choosing a different path.
My son, not CS/SE, but an engineer, went through three interviews, the last of which was ten hours. They make sure you’ll fit in personality wise and that you know your stuff.