<p>I think elite universities will not be the sole thing that gets one prospective employee hired over another who went to a less prestigious school. They will look at your past experience, grades, recs, among other things. If both said prospective employees were very similar, however, the brand name college one would have the edge simply because of the school’s reputation as yielding smart, driven students…Where you went to college only really helps when on your first job hunt also. After that, they’ll look more at your past job experiences.</p>
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<p>I believe the point that was being made is that the number of students accepted to an elite private college who then decide not to attend such a school is exceedingly small. Less than 2% of students admitted to HYPSM enroll instead in a public university, presumably to their local state U. If you expand the list to the top 10 private universities and LACs the percentage of students defecting to a public school would not rise significantly. Even for those without significant need-based aid, the ROI from attending an elite college far outweigh the tuition cost differential.</p>
<p>There is a research study that the kids who go to Ivies and other elite colleges make more money. The Op is completely right–do employers look at peoples credentials yes, but a brand name has a significant impact. How many kids graduate from these elite universities, not many–there a commodity thats in demand. Companies always like to tout the credentials of their employees and saying o 50% of our graduates are from Ivies, sounds pretty good for prospective investors/customers/patients or whatever. It all depends on what you want, if you want a middle class paying job, I am sure that a t2 or t3 university is fine. If you want to be a top hedge fund guy, doctor, lawyer it really helps to have that extra boost in getting hired and even in the business itself.</p>
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<p>Care to cite the study, Bescraze? What was it again, $100k over the course of a lifetime?</p>
<p>This was posted in response to Cayuga red in the threat–I guess your memory isn’t so great.</p>
<p>CayugaRed:</p>
<p>You obviously never read the actual study.</p>
<p>What Dale & Krueger found was exactly was bescraze was stating. Where you got to college affects your future income, even after controlling for SAT scores.</p>
<p>One of the main conclusions of the study is:</p>
<p>Quote:
… we still find a sizable payoff from attending more elite colleges as measured by Barron’s selectivity rankings and tuition costs.
Quote:
Even after adjusting for selection, however we do find that the school the student attends matters for his or her subsequent income.
A key finding was that SAT score alone was not a good proxy for selectivity. As soon as they used a more comprehensive measure such as Barron’s selectivity index, significant differences in income emerged.</p>
<p>Quote:
The characteristics of schools that influence a student’s subsequent income appear to be better captured by Barron’s broad based measure of selectivity than the school’s average SAT score.
This is not a surprising finding. The most selective colleges use more than just SAT scores for admission.</p>
<p>Quote:
In a regression model, men who attend a the most competitive colleges earn 23% more than men who attend very competitive colleges, other variables being equal. In the self-revelation model, the gap is 13%. The estimated effect of attending a most competitive colleges is even more robust for women, 21% in the regression model and 18% in the self-revelation model.
For both men and women, these models indicate that students who attend more selective colleges earn more after entering the labor market.</p>
<p>The 23% difference in income is just between Tier 1 and Tier 2 colleges in the Barron’s rankings. Differences were even greater when comparing to lower tier colleges. Even after adjusting for the self-revelation effect, the difference was still 13% for men and 18% for women, hardly insignificant. A finer segmentation using the USNWR ranking would find a significantly greater difference between the very elite colleges and the lower Tier schools. The one such school included in the D&K study (it appears to be Yale) was off the charts.</p>
<p>An interesting but not widely publicized finding of the study was that the more the student payed in tution the more they earned.</p>
<p>Quote:
In addition, we find that students who attend colleges with higher tuition costs tend to earn higher income years later. The internal rate of return on college tuition for students who attend colleges in the late 70’s was quite high, in the range of 20 to 30 percent.
Dale & Krueger speculated that the higher the tuition the higher the investment in education by the school.</p>
<p>Quote:
College tuition may have a significant effect on subsequent earnings because schools with higher tuition may provide their students with more, or higher quality, resources.
Quote:
Finally, in the self-revelation models, the expenditure per student variables had statistically significant and positive effects on earnings that were similar in magnitude to the coefficient on tuition from the corresponding model.
Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard specializing in the economics of education, has done research that confirms many of the Krueger-Dale findings. Using 1997-98 tuition figures, Hoxby concluded that a student who gave up a full scholarship at a Rank Three private college (average SATs: 90th percentile in verbal, 86th in math) to pay full price at a Rank One selective college (average SATs: 96th percentile in verbal, 93rd in math) earned back the difference in cost 3.4 times over his lifetime. Those who moved from paying average tuition at a Rank Three public college to paying average tuition at a Rank One private school earned back the difference in cost more than 30 times over.</p>
<p>So, the main conclusion from the D & K study is that which college you attend does matter and the more selective the college the greater the difference in future income. This contradicts the widespread belief that an investment in attending an expensive private colleges does not pay. Furthermore, the more you pay the more you earn.</p>
<p>So what about the seemingly contradictory results in the study that where you go does not matter?</p>
<p>That is only true if you exclude all the highly selective colleges and most private colleges. Let’s say you turn down UC Riverside and attend Cal State Pomona instead, you probably won’t suffer economically. But turn down UC Berkeley to go to San Francisco State and you will pay a price in lost income. Turn down Stanford and you will pay an even bigger price.</p>
<p>The differential becomes greatest at the elite college level. There the D&K model breaks down completely. There is simply no data on students that get admitted to HYPSM and attend much less selective colleges, simply because such students don’t exist (at least statistically speaking). Maybe once every ten years will somebody get admitted to Princeton and decide to go to Rutgers instead. It just does’t happen! The elite schools lose less than 2% of their admitted students to ALL public schools combined and the very few actually attend the most selective publics such as Berkeley, Michigan or UVA. At an average yield of around 70%, the elite colleges lose students to each other and hardly any to other schools. There could be a variety of reasons for choosing a less selective school over Harvard or MIT, but economics is not one of them.</p>
<p>A copy of the D&K report can be found here:
<a href=“http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf[/url]”>http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf</a></p>
<p>The last point about why Elite colleges are worth it: JOBS!</p>
<p>Reposted again:</p>
<p>The data shows this extends beyond just PhD programs which are notoriously incestuous. It is just the same with law and med school admission. It is often repeated that only your LSAT or MCAT score and GPA matters to get into law or med school. That may be true for AN AVERAGE professional school, but definitely not for the elite law and medical schools. Harvard gets between 20 and 25% of its law school class from Harvard College. Harvard is a great school, but that much better so as to take a quarter of all slots? I don’t think so. Same thing with its medical school. Once past the first selection step, the interview is the real determinant. It certainly helps if your medical advisor happens to be on the HMS faculty. While surveys from feeder schools such as the WSJ may be based on a very narrow set of professional schools but the conclusions are very definitive. Other studies have all shown the same effect. Top professional schools get the majority of the students from elite colleges. If you think that any two law or medical degrees are the same think again. Top law firms hire from a very limited group of law schools and many physician practices do the same. I have actually found major private practices in high income specialties such as radiology or cardiology to nearly exclusively hire from top medical schools. They know the signaling effect to their client base of having another HMS grad in their practice. You go to their web site and they just about pimp their new partners through their resumes. Academic medicine is even more selective.</p>
<p>Your first job often has a major influence on the next step in your career. It is a key stepping stone, and if you miss that step you may have a tough time catching up afterwards. Many top jobs at investment banks or major corporations are only obtained after an internship. This process is also highly incestuous with alumni of a fairly narrow range of colleges already filling the top ranks. Getting that plum internship out of nowhere, just on grades is just extremely hard.</p>
<p>You can call it the brand effect, the signaling effect or whatever, the fact remains that graduates of elite colleges are a fairly rare commodity and they will often get a first pick at key entry positions. You still have to be good to get the job, but is still fairly rare that the applicant from the elite college is unqualified. Getting to the interview is not the first thing, it is sometimes the only thing. The bright student from your second tier school wil never even see the job posting.
Last edited by cellardweller : 06-02-2008 at 05:36 PM.</p>
<p>Bescraze – </p>
<p>Thanks. I’m well aware of the thread that was referenced. Unfortunately others might not be. Here it is for reference:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/517718-attending-ivy-league-school-results-higher-income.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/517718-attending-ivy-league-school-results-higher-income.html</a></p>
<p>More importantly, there was substantial disagreement about cellardweller’s assertion, yet you choose not to bring light of this fact. The most interesting thing was that all of the popular press about the article and an academic reading of the article (and others) suggests exactly the opposite of what you assert. That what school you attend among the top tier largely does not matter, and the jury is still out on the absolute impact.</p>
<p>[Does</a> an Elite College Really Pay? - MSN Encarta](<a href=“http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/departments/elearning/?article=elitecollege]Does”>http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/departments/elearning/?article=elitecollege)</p>
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<p>[Who</a> Needs Harvard?](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200410/easterbrook]Who”>Who Needs Harvard? - The Atlantic)</p>
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<p>Everything else that is being said is just anecdotal assertions.</p>
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<p>Actually, the same problem afflicts all of these studies, in that they aren’t controlled experiments (in fairness, because they can’t be). In other words, people who get into elite schools yet turn them down don’t just do so randomly; they do so for a reason. What that effectively means is that those people who actually get into top schools and then turn them down are different from those who get into top schools and actually go. </p>
<p>As a case in point, I know a guy who turned down a number of Ivies for his raw lower ranked state school. Why? Simple. Football. He was a top football prospect and his state school is a perennial national championship contender. More importantly, that school is also well known as an NFL factory school, and making it to the NFL is his dream. He now has an excellent chance of doing just that, and if he does, even if just as a backup player, he’ll probably earn literally ten times what an Ivy grad will earn to start.</p>
<p>Nor is professional sports the only reason why somebody might turn down an elite school for a lesser school. I can think of people doing so to enter combined BS/MD programs that offer guaranteed admission to med school, I can think of people choosing the lower-ranked school because of a highly highly specific program that the school might offer, and I can obviously think of people going to a lower-ranked school that is offering a full merit scholarship. But that all simply illustrates the point that nobody actually randomly decides to turn down a top-ranked school, which means that endogeneity is a serious issue.</p>
<p>There are three mainstream jobs that make students on a potential straight shot millionaire track by age 30 in my opinion. These are computer scientist, investment banker, and management consultant. The top schools get recruited for these jobs much more than non-top schools, and since there are only a limited number of these jobs available, it skews income in favor of top schools. </p>
<p>My definition of “mainstream jobs” is jobs that typically recruit a non-well-connected student for first-year positions.</p>
<p>The father of a former co-worker of mine sat on the admissions committee at a medical school. My co-worker told me that his father vetoed any candidate who didn’t attend a “brand name school.” My co-worker said that his father didn’t care if an applicant had a 4.0 average and perfect MCAT scores … if the candidate attended a no name school, his/her application was rejected by the father.</p>
<p>Likewise, I have worked for employers who salivated over any resume that mentioned a degree from an elite institution. They didn’t care if the job seeker majored in art history, anthropology or classical languages and literature. The rationale was this: “if he/she had a degree from an elite school, she/he must be smart and we can train them to do the job.”</p>
<p>The plural of anecdote is not data.</p>
<p>Would Columbia count as one of these elite schools or is the term restricted to those 3, HYP?</p>
<p>Different but not totally unrelated question: in mention of elite schools, one sometimes hears, CHYMPS. Does the C stand for Caltech or for Columbia? Thanks.</p>
<p>It depends what you mean by elite schools. I personally say an elite school is anything within the top 100 USNEWS rankings. Anything below is probally crap, though there are some elite schools hiding down there too.</p>
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You have to be joking. If you look in any neutral college guide sold in bookstores, usually the top 20 universities are referred to as “the elite universities” and then UC-Berkeley is referred to as “the elite public university.”</p>
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this is the biggest load of crap I’ve read on this forum… anyone else agree?</p>
<p>My problem with the attitude of you-have-to-go-brand-name, or ivy-league-or-die is that makes kids think that their entire future rests on a decision they make at 18. It would be hard to express how much I think that’s not true. People change careers in their 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and beyond, and strangely, when they submit their resumes, no one is looking at where they went to school.
It is nice to be able to say you went to Harvard. It will probably always impress. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a handicap to go elsewhere. In fact, I think the handicap may be in believing that the most important thing you will ever do in your life is apply to college.
Go feed someone who’s starving and get a little perspective!</p>
<p>I’m finally glad to find some SUBSTANTIVE evidence that shows that the BRAND NAME you went to school matters the MOST if you want to have a rich and successful life. </p>
<p>Again, think about this: JOBS. The two jobs out there that are guarantee to provide you with a lifetime of wealth, prestige, and respect (that are not doctors or lawyers) are: investment banker or management consultant. </p>
<p>I was one of the very few people from my Top 50 who got an investment banking job, but I majored in business finance. Out of my analyst class, there was one of me and two from Rutgers, and all of us were business finance majors. The rest were people from the Ivies. And what were their majors? English literature, communications, economics, liberal arts. These Ivy League graduates had NEVER taken a BUSINESS CLASS (w/ exception of economics majors) yet they were hired by big time brokerage firms and investment banks. </p>
<p>Investment banks and management consulting firms are probably the only two fields that will allow you to make significant income (possibly even be millionaires) by the age of 30. And you know what? Once you make that much, you’re allowed to retire early and can pursue whatever dreams you want.</p>
<p>I personally know a Chinese American filmmaker who retired at the age of 30. She worked at McKinsey Company as a management consultant and is now financially secured for the rest of her life. She’s ONLY in her early 30s and she’s financially secured for her life. Think about it. </p>
<p>She graduated from Harvard and Harvard Business School and now gets to pursue her passions in filmmaking. </p>
<p>If she didn’t go to Harvard and become a management consultant, would she be able to retire at age 30 and become a filmmaker? </p>
<p>Investment banks, management consulting firms, and other top companies DON’T CARE about what job skills you have, your GPA, or your resume. All they CARE about is you going to a top brand name school. If you have that (and provided you don’t screw up in the interview – which is hard to do, just don’t sound like a dumbarse), then you’ll get the job.</p>
<p>Ivy League graduates don’t have very high standards to meet when it comes to getting jobs at top investment banks and consulting firms. They can major in pathetic subjects like medieval history, women’s studies, Asian studies, and English literature, and they will get the job over the top business school graduates from TTTs (third tier toilets). </p>
<p>And elite schools being the Top 100? You’re joking. At best, the elite schools are the US News Top 25 - 30 National Universities, and Top 5 LACs.</p>
<p>ramaswami wrote: “one sometimes hears, CHYMPS. Does the C stand for Caltech or for Columbia? Thanks.”</p>
<p>There was a thread about a month ago where this was discussed. Most people say Caltech, by virtue of being higher ranked than Columbia in virtually every measure. It also follows the logical progession of adding a second primarily science school (Also top 5-6) to: HYP -> HYPS -> HYPSM -> CHYMPS</p>
<p>To answer the OP’s original question, the answer is No, or extremely minimally.</p>
<p>In the real world of business, beyond the very first job, nobody cares where of if a person went to college. It’s all “what have you done for me this month”, and little else.</p>
<p>I attended one of the CHYMPS schools.</p>
<p>^^I am not sure how true that is. Why do you think alot of the predominantly rich people in society graduated from this elite schools. Prestige and social networking–these things cannot be found in most other places and in almost all state schools for that matter(however good). Is your life over if you do not attend these elite schools, NO. You can work hard and be extremely successful, it is just more challenging.</p>
<p>Going to an elite school is just the first step, you can miss a step and keep going, but if you had the chance why not take it?</p>