<p>Let's talk. </p>
<p>Both, but mostly the latter in the US.</p>
<p>It’s a combination of both. Elite universities accept top-notch students and give them incredible resources to continue their success. </p>
<p>It’s mystifyingly common for posters here to pose the “Harvard slacker vs. Rural Bush U hard worker” question, as if students suddenly lose all drive and ambition once they get admitted to a top university. The better question is how well a hard worker at Harvard would stack up relative to one at Rural Bush University – and one suspects the answer is “extremely well.” </p>
<p>I tend to believe that successful people will succeed no matter where they go to school.</p>
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<a href=“http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2004/10/education-easterbrook”>http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2004/10/education-easterbrook</a></p>
<p>What do you mean by “successful?”</p>
<p>For example, if by “successful” you meant becoming a member of the United States Supreme Court, I would suggest that it matters what law school you attend.</p>
<p>Bidirectional relationship? You have to be a hard-working, ambitious, excellent student and person to get into a top university or college. In return, they provide you with incredible resources so that your hard work, ambition, and excellence only get strong and result in great returns.</p>
<p>There’s evidence on both sides. There’s the study referenced above, that showed that students who were admitted to top colleges but chose to go elsewhere were just as financially successful as their peers who actually attended the top colleges.</p>
<p>But, there’s also evidence showing that IF they can get admitted to these elite schools, students from low-income, low-performing public schools graduate at the same rates and do just as well as their wealthy peers. However, in that case there’s no evidence that the students from the low-income schools are less successful - on the contrary, they may be even more hard-working, given that they achieved a comparable level of excellence against all odds.</p>
<p>First of all we’d have to stipulate whether “success” is monetary or having a fulfilling life. We’d also have to define “elite,” which could be a dozen universities or 100. But I’ll bite: the top U’s skim the cream. It may have been Malcolm Gladwell who said that a Yale degree means you worked hard in High School. If, as an experiment, you enrolled this year’s Yale freshman class at Western Michigan University, it is a pretty sure bet that they would all go as “far” in life as with a degree from New Haven.</p>
<p>Would they be successful graduating from WMU - however you want to measure it? Yes.
Would they be as successful in the same elite institutions that Yale graduates get entrance to? Probably not.</p>
<p>Admittedly an 8 year old list, but the list of undergraduate schools of the Fortune 50 CEOs shows quite a few WMU equivalents.</p>
<p><a href=“Where the Fortune 50 CEOs Went to College - TIME”>http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1227055,00.html</a></p>
<p>^But if they are not, it’s not because of a lack of ambition or success - it would be simply because certain elite corporations (and we’re mostly talking about consulting and banking here) have identified a handful of schools at which they recruit. This is for a variety of factors, such as 1) schools like Yale skim the cream off the top, so the recruiters know they are getting the best and the brightest; 2) they know that students at schools like Yale are well-trained, because Yale has the resources to do so; and 3) a lot of the recruiters and current employees are alumni of schools like Yale themselves, so they show preference for other alumni of their institutions. Only #2 has anything to do with the caliber of the school itself.</p>
<p>If students had to apply blindly to organizations - in other words, if the recruiters didn’t know what institution they were coming from - then we could do a real test.</p>
<p>My best friend was dirt poor, got an Ivy League education and had a lot of loans, paid them off by age 30 and is doing very well. Parents are still dirt poor, helps them as much as possible.</p>
<p>The family is extremely uneducated and mocks going to college. My best friend is one of only two total of tens and tens of relatives who has gone to college.</p>
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Are u implying friend wouldn’t have done well if friend went to State U?</p>
<p>I always harp on the definition of successful, because there are a lot of fields other than being CEOs of big corporations. For example, if your definition of success is ultimately getting a tenure-track teaching position at a leading university, where you want to college and grad school matters. Also, it’s my opinion that the college you go to can shape your ideas about what success is–thus, there are some colleges where public service is emphasized, and graduates are more likely to go to work for the government or for non-profits. Are they less “successful” than people who go to work for big accounting firms? So, the same smart kid may be just as successful coming out of Harvard or Michigan State–but he may be doing very different things with his life. That’s not so easy to measure.</p>
<p>Actually, yes, I am implying that my friend would not have done well at State U. Our State U. has a lot of commuters, a spread out campus requiring buses to go to all classes, tiny dorm rooms, and basically is a drag. The support and community at the Ivy League school was instrumental to the realization that yes, I can make it despite my family background.</p>
<p>The more influence my friend from family during college, the worse the outcome would have been. So technically, it was not only that it would have been State U., but living at home or going home much more.</p>
<p>My son’s friend is at State U., very bright and got a lot of grants, and he is home every weekend because the campus life sux for him. My son is adamant he will not end up there, and there are other choices that are not as expensive or elite as Ivies where at least there is a real campus life.</p>
<p>YMMV.</p>
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<p>Not to sidetrack, but working for a non-profit is emphatically NOT public service. Try looking at what people at non-profits (or academia), especially the leaders, earn. Just because the entity is supposedly a non-profit doesn’t mean that the top people are not earning top, top dollar. (The rise in college tuition is in large part due to the huge increase in the number of administrators earning six-figure salaries at all those non-profit schools.) And don’t get me started about the revolving door at the top levels of government “public service”. And yes, all those top level position are easier to obtain by going to (and making connections at) top level schools.</p>
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<p>Is this a flagship state university, or a non-flagship state university whose primary emphasis is serving local and non-traditional students who do not want to relocate to go to school?</p>
<p>Not all state universities are like what you describe. Flagship type state universities are more likely to have more campus life and community feeling than others, though.</p>
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well, not all non-profits are created equal, of course, but plenty of them are charitable organizations aimed at addressing some social problem. Are you suggesting that only people who work for government agencies are engaged in public service?</p>
<p>No, I’m saying that people who work for non-profits, NGOs, and even government at all levels like to classify themselves as more “noble” than those who work in the for-profit sector, but the reality is the employees of those organizations are often all well compensated, sometimes even more so than the money-grubbing private sector. Even religious organizations are often headed by people who are very well paid.</p>
<p>@Hunt: For getting a tenure-track position, where you went to get your PhD and (most importantly) how much promise you show as a researcher matters.</p>
<p>Where you went for undergrad doesn’t.</p>