Re: #55. Blossom, please provide us parents with suggestions on how to “learn how labor markets operate.” I can’t speak for other parents, but one reason we looked for a top school with a good career services center is precisely because we aren’t high SES and don’t have knowledge of the modern job marketplace. Not only that, but DH works in a very different field from what my children pursued/plan to pursue, as did I (and I have been out of the workplace for too long for any knowledge to be applicable anyway).
I can tell you what I do with my high school junior. We look at ads for jobs she may be interested in having one day and see what qualifications are being requested. We read the bios of people actually holding positions like those and see where they went to college and grad school and what they majored in. Any professional contacts D can obtain, she takes advantage of by writing to people and asking for educational and career advice and jobs. Lastly, we search for internship opportunities online and D applies to the relevant ones. However, I cannot confidently say that any of that translates into understanding how labor markets operate.
This has been proven in our family and among many of our friends and their children. Specifically in our case, for medicine, engineering and CS, the name of your college does not matter. The locality of engineering and CS job will make a difference is salary, but it is understandable because the salaries are adjusted to the cost of living, otherwise, you will not get eligible employees, nobody will move from Ohio to NYC for the same salary.
TheGFG, Your daughter sounds like a real go getter. Somehow, I have a feeling she’s not going to be one of those kids blossom talked about that has never been to the career center in 4 years or that will come up with 42 reasons why they don’t have a job! We did not tell our kids what to major in but did expect them to be employed during the summers during college and to line up a job for after graduation. They both made good use of career fairs and their career center. I think it can be useful to see what kinds of companies are coming to campus and where graduates are ending up.
The world will continue to get more and more competitive for reasonable paying jobs, and as competition increases in professions that previously have been understaffed (engineering for example), competition will increase dramatically. The world is changing at a pace that makes historical analysis spurious, and deciding on a path based on where “uncle Joe” made a living or “my friends dad” made a fortune is (IMO) a recipe for middle age frustration as the sands shift.
Rankings, statistics, and these boards all serve to reinforce you’re making the right decision. If you’re student is in a Highly Selective school, the others don’t know what you’ve seen surrounding your kids. If your kid is in a state school and paying $10k-$20k less per year, you tell yourself that A) you never wanted the selectives for Jr. and B) he / she is getting the exact same education for half the price.
In a world where automation and globalization make commodities of nearly everything, It is difficult to believe that the kids who excelled enough to gain highly selective admission won’t outperform the others. The past is an indication of future results.
Posters with practical insights into recruiting and labor markets are very valuable but there are now multiple studies saying the same thing. At least in STEM, the knowledge & skills learned at college outweigh the college’s prestige.
Is this a change in college recruiting methods used in the past? Are employers moving away from the “target school” approach favored by consulting firms and investment banks.
A whole paragraph on how history is a bad indication of the future and then your last sentence completely contradicts it. Does the past indicate the future or not?
I can turn your second paragraph on you- these rankings, statistics and boards all serve to reinforce you are making the right decision. The others whose kids are not in your cost effective school don’t see what you have seen. While you are shelling out $250,000 for what they are paying $100,000 for you tell yourself it is all worth it because your kid is making connections and getting a way better education.
Edited: Your last paragraph says “those who have excelled enough to gain admission” So you agree with the studies that say it isn’t the schools that matter- it is the student?
I agree with Blossom. To me this research appears to be so poorly done, that I really can’t tell anything. I would be embarrassed to have my name on this work. That leaves the discussion back at people generally concluding what they want to conclude to feel better about themselves.
The valid point is that choosing your major well is usually more important than the school, and the impact of the school may depend a lot on which major you choose.
Well, Here’s another survey, one with research on where grads go and salaries, etc. Many schools are looking at student outcomes. http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/reports.php Penn is of course top heavy on kids going into finance and consulting. If you have dreams when you’re 17 of ending up at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey some day, you probably do up your chances by attending a school like Penn. No surprise there.
I disagree with much of @EyeVeee’s post #63, but there was, I believe, one important truth about human existence in the middle of it:
It’s been said many times by many people (e.g., still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest), but that doesn’t make it any less real—humans are really, really bad at sifting through data, so we find confirmation of our own experiences and expectations no matter what we’re faced with.
The last kid I met with majored in marketing and is unemployed. He is baffled. So many jobs that he applies for have the word “marketing” in the title, and he majored in marketing. And yet he goes on Linkedin and sees young people who have jobs that he would love to have, and they majored in psychology or history or applied math and he wonders how the heck they got jobs when they didn’t major in marketing.
This is the kind of disconnect I’m talking about. To have spent four years getting a vocational degree for a field which has changed so dramatically (Big Data was just on the horizon when he started freshman year and now it’s all anyone talks about in marketing- oh, plus geospatial analysis)… well, that’s sad. If he’d studied history at least he’d know something. But he studied a bunch of out of date case studies, and the analytical tools that he learned have been overshadowed by the internet’s ability to deliver metrics on eyeballs and purchasing patterns and psychographics which didn’t even exist 10 years ago when his textbooks were being delivered to the publisher for editing.
GFG- your daughter wants to major in Classics, correct? If she plans to teach, or work at an archive or museum, or do something else entirely, her best bet is to do really well in college, get involved in one or more activities that give her a professional network (volunteer at a local historical society- obviously, not dealing with historical material dating back to ancient times but preservation is preservation and insects and humidity and erosion are a factor everywhere) or do something outside of the classroom that demonstrates initiative and organizational skills. Learn Drupal or another packaged software program that makes websites… every school or museum or non-profit needs help with their blog/content/social media/website. Learn one of the packaged programs that professional fundraisers use (they aren’t hard to learn but they are time consuming) and then volunteer for her college’s alumni association or a local organization that she cares about. I can’t think of a single museum that wouldn’t welcome a young employee who was proficient at Raiser’s Edge or similar.
On my driver’s license I list my aspirational hair color AND weight. So much for the accuracy of self-reported data!!!
Of course, few students are choosing between history at Yale versus some other major at UConn (which does not have a leisure studies major). Since few are admitted to Yale, the choices are likely history versus some other major at UConn (for the few admitted to Yale, the choices of history at Yale and some other major at Yale are added).
For the common student (who is not admitted to Yale or any other elite school), how would you advise him/her to choose major and/or post-graduation goals?
Also useful is a working knowledge of the time value of money. The long term difference between graduating with a few thousand in the bank vs graduating with debt equivalent to two years’ salary is staggering. 10k a year delta in pay won’t begin to cover it.
Taking that gamble is a big roll of the dice.
There are valid reasons to choose an expensive college; ROI isn’t one.
@“Erin’s Dad” …15 years ago, the smart engineering grad would have taken a job at Enron over Google based on data.
It baffles me that so many justify their own position by poking holes in the backgrounds of others. The history of selective schools not rewarding their graduates financially has countless variables that can’t be measured. Ivy League grads have options that others don’t, often doing things they enjoy for less money. They don’t go to school to get a job (sure, some do…) because they have abilities and experiences that have constantly reinforced their intellectual superiority will deliver for them.
Where the mid level graduates excel is in the political and social aspects of employment. They aren’t as intellectually gifted, but have historically been successful by being good at "playing the game. The smartest folks in a company are rarely the leaders (in large organizations, not entrepreneurs / small business).
In the end, every aspect of this conversation is personally dictated by each and every student. The middle class has disappeared for many businesses, and will continue to shrink in the US. As the number of “good jobs” gets smaller, I believe fewer graduates from mid tier schools will get the opportunity to turn their social skills into cash. In 20 years, I believe the data will show that undergraduate brand recognition was immensely more valuable, and that the class of 2020 engineering undergrads will often be under-employed.
I have no data, it’s true, but 20 years ago who would have bet a search engine would create the most valuable company in the world, and that a petroleum engineering degree will get you a job at one of the 20 million Starbucks locations in Texas?
At least in my state, I anticipate that an elite school degree will become more important than ever because the best students the last 10 years have been predominantly Asian. Since that is a population that highly values the top schools, I would expect that as they achieve career success and move into management and hiring positions, they will strongly favor elite college graduates. And the ranking tiers they employ are far stricter than ours or those used in the study. Just yesterday a friend was telling me that her son’s college decision came down Stanford full pay and Tulane with a scholarship. The young man’s Chinese colleagues were shocked that with Stanford as an option he would even consider Tulane for one minute.
As I mentioned, D is in the process of applying for summer internships. Last night she looked at the bios of the staff in the relevant departments for the application she was working on. They hail from institutions like Oxford, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Berkeley, NYU, Haverford/Bryn Mawr and Williams. Fortunately, for undergrad I did see one Fordham and one Rutgers alum, and 2 Union grads, but I think 3 of the 4 were administrative support staff. There were no non-elites for the grad degrees.
Of course, this information is essentially useless in D’s case (and in most students’ situations), because she won’t be eligible for an elite school.
“The world will continue to get more and more competitive for reasonable paying jobs”
not really. It is not that easy to find qualifying employees in engineering and CS, possible many other area. These are NOT greatly paying jobs, but they are reasonably paying jobs. The Harvard name on your resume most likely will not make you look more qualifying in these fields either.
“The young man’s Chinese colleagues were shocked that with Stanford as an option he would even consider Tulane for one minute.”
That’s an understandable decision based on family finances, and the young man’s Chinese colleagues should shut up unless they are planning to subsidize the young man’s parents’ retirement.
@MiamiDAP The number of qualified engineers and CS folks globally is increasing dramatically, and very capable people can be found in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America with alarming ease at a fraction of the cost in the US. There will always be a need for “on-site” professionals, but all “in-house” work that is geographically neutral will be done outside the US soon. I know of an office in Eastern Europe right now where engineers review blueprints / plans in 14 languages (since all planning happens in the local language), and the compensation for Engineers with graduate degrees is in $30k range per year.
This discussion focuses on how in the past mid-tier professionals have been able to earn the same salaries as their elite peers, but while everyone is keep looking up, the folks below are gaining…FAST. Pretty soon, you won’t need a staff of engineers in Connecticut, you’ll need a few with a satellite office in Budapest, or Bogota, or Bangalore. When the time comes for the owner in CT to hire 1 local, I feel the Harvard kid is going to have a better chance than most others.
“While it may be true (but likely not- the numbers are self-reported and just ask any middle aged woman if she actually is the weight she’s got listed on her driver’s license if you want a quick lesson on self-reporting and accuracy) it doesn’t mean anything FOR YOUR KID.”
Now, now. My height, hair color and eye color are fully accurate
