<p>From the link...
"Social scientists distinguish between what are known as treatment effects and selection effects. The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesnt have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. Its confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modelling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You dont become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because youre beautiful.</p>
<p>At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic trainingthat being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide. Fuelling the treatment-effect idea are studies showing that if you take two students with the same S.A.T. scores and grades, one of whom goes to a school like Harvard and one of whom goes to a less selective college, the Ivy Leaguer will make far more money ten or twenty years down the road.</p>
<p>The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modelling agency than like the Marine Corps,"</p>
<p>If the Harvard's of the world really train the future leaders, why do these schools pick students like a modeling agency picks models?</p>
<p>Maybe, they don't really train future leaders. Which means,
this need to get into these top schools is misplaced.</p>
<p>Maybe the Harvard's of the world already know they don't train future leaders, and this is why they search for students who are already leaders.</p>
<p>"The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesnt have an enormous admissions office grading app"</p>
<p>But the Marine Corps does not apply its treatment to everyone. Rather, a very self selected group that thinks it knows what it is in for volunteers. Those who made a big mistake wash out or at least wish they would.</p>
<p>Some good law schools used to be famously difficult but would let almost anyone in who volunteered. They would then flunk out a big percentage of each class, after they incurred much cost and suffering. This is a very open approach and is fair in a certain way, but there sure is an argument for selecting admitees with a higher chance of success.</p>
<p>Well my mother always told me it is who you know that counts not what you know. I believe there is a big part of that at play in the future success of haravrd graduates which is way they probably should not end legacy preferences.</p>
<p>The fact is two equally intelligent, well educated students, one at Harvard and the other at State U are not going to have the same opportunities because they are not going to have the same roommates and their roommates are not going to have the same fathers.</p>
<p>Real cream will rise anywhere but 2% milk will rise at Harvard. Not that that is a bad thing...</p>
<p>Even beyond Cato's point is the question whether there really is value in attending a school with the very best. Or to put it another way, where you are not the best but rather perhaps in the middle. Even without the social and business connections, you learn a lot from other students, and it can't hurt if they are by some definition the best.</p>
<p>More bluntly, I think the primary value of attending an elite school is the other students you will be associating with there, not the quality of the teaching, the Nobel prize quality grad school research, or the ivy on the walls.</p>
<p>dstark, aren't you are the one who repeatedly posts that ivy league admits do better in life, whether or not they attend ivy league schools? Correct me if I don't understand you correctly.</p>
<p>Now, the current thread asks, is it to your advantage to attend a school with a high percentage of students like that? My answer is yes. You seem to be seeking confirmation of your view that your own talent is all that matters and not the talent of the student body, as thus defined. I don't collude with this, but apparently you are not moved.</p>
<p>I am very interested in knowing what best is. </p>
<p>Up in Oregon, Ivy Leaguers run, the businesses, the government, the hospitals, the colleges, the schools systems, the charities. That's correct, right?</p>
<p>"Fueling the treatment-effect idea are studies showing that if you take 2 students with the same SAT scores and grades, one of whom goes to a school like Harvard and one of whom goes to a less selective college, the ivy leaguer will make far more money ten or twenty years down the road."</p>
<p>I believe there are studies to show that is not true. From what I understand if you get into Harvard, instead go to Penn State, a decade or 2 down the line you will be earning what the H grad in your field is earning.</p>
<p>Whether or not Ivy Leaguers disproportionatly make money or run institutions, which in some areas they might after subtracting out the home-towners, the education gained from being with a better rather than a lesser group of students is important to some of us. Whether the Ivy League admits the best by your definition or mine is almost a separate question from the one you opened this thread with. Does the school make the student? My answer is Yes, at least if you include the student body of the school as a big part of what the school is.</p>
<p>In any case, there are people, possibly including you, who grew up among the best, somehow defined, of their peers or their community or whatever. They could go to state u and still be among the best, missing the growth experience of being closer to the middle of the pack among other top students, which I consider an wonderful experience even if it doesn't make you rich or a CEO or whatever.</p>
<p>Take four students. Two go to Stanford. Two turn down Stanford to go to state schools. Are the two that chose Stanford better than the two that didn't?</p>
<p>Will the two that chose Stanford have better lives?</p>
<p>I'm curious because there are four specific students that I am thinking about. </p>
<p>I don't go to Harvard. I go to Olin, a school many people have never heard of. Still, I think the students I go to school with are some of the best. By that, I mean that they are interesting, kind, smart human beings who are not only able to help others, but willing.</p>
<p>i transfered to an ivy league school from a US news ranked top 50 private school. </p>
<p>I transfered for both social and academic reasons. The academic reasons are obvious: I'm getting a better education (yes, I firmly believe this). </p>
<p>The social reasons also played a big role. At my old school, the basic theme was get wasted and try to make it to class hung over. If you do and survive your morning class, brag about it for 30 minutes over dinner. This took place all seven days of the week ... just constant partying with no regard to academics. I know the student body was not the same calibur as an ivy league school's is: but damn, it was sooo obvious. Most people just seemed either too apathetic or too stupid for their own good. The thing they were best at was shooting a ping pong ball into a small plastic cup full of beer from a table-length away. Now, every student wasn't like this (myself) but enough were for me to be able to make a broad generalization like this one. After a year there I'm fairly certain that my generalization is pretty accurate. </p>
<p>The stuent body is much different at my current school. Though we still have parties, it's only limited to fridays and saturdays for the most part. The majority of people are highly motivated and brilliant. What still amazes me is what awesome stuff I can learn just from a random 2 A.M. conversation with my best friend in the lounge. It's wonderful to be in an environment where working hard is the norm and you wont be looked down upon for not being wasted. </p>
<p>Also, the modeling agency reference isn't a sound analogy. True, you dont become beautiful by signing with a modeling agency ... but are they suggesting that you dont learn anything more by going to an ivy league school? </p>
<p>I, for one, will attest that the student body should be an important part of the college search. I disregarded this aspect in my first college search: big mistake. </p>
<p>Because everybody else is so motivated to do well, I am also pushed to do my best. </p>
<p>Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a group meeting out in the lounge to discuss today's rather difficult lecture about Prima Facie legal arguments...</p>
<p>Well, the fact is that none of these statistics can control for human preferences, and consequently cannot possibly predict anything statistically better than within 3sd, which is not considered statistically significant.</p>
<p>The Harvard experience may very well encourage their grads to take jobs with high salaries in big cities, but that doesn't mean that they stay there. Or even succeed there.</p>
<p>"Will the two that chose Stanford have better lives?"</p>
<p>If you want to define better lives as making more money, having more power, maybe even having more influence, the answer is "possibly, but not necessarily." If that is your main consideration, save the money, assuming you have a great state school and have too high an efc to make Stanford affordable, in your framework.</p>
<p>If you define better life in terms of a better education, broadly defined, my answer is an easy yes, even if it means the parents or eventually the student foregoes things like vacation homes, driving new luxury cars, fashionable clothers, whatever. But then some of us value education for its own sake more than others. To each his own.</p>
<p>"Also, the modeling agency reference isn't a sound analogy."</p>
<p>I think the op wants us to conclude that the beautiful model should sign up with her local tanning salon as her agent, because that NYC or LA agency wasn't going to make her any more beautiful or otherwise be with the higher commission they demand.</p>
<p>"Two go to Stanford. Two turn down Stanford to go to state schools."</p>
<p>Every time I wrote Ivy, I was thinking Stanford. Another question, though, even to the extent I have a point, is how much difference between two particular schools exists as to the factors that matter to you. Stanford vs. Nowhere State College is an easier question for me than some others. U. Mich., in state, vs. Northwestern is a question that comes up on this board from time to time.</p>
<p>what's most important to distinguish about Hilary (if my facts are correct) ... regardless of where she went for undergrad, she went to Yale Law school where she met Bill. Do you think things would have changed if she went to Harvard law?</p>
<p>Old joke: Bill and Hillary are driving through the countryside and stop for gas. Hillary recognizes the gas station attendant as her old boyfriend from highschool and says hello. Later Bill say, aren't you glad you married a guy who would become President instead of him? Hilary responds, "Oh, Bill. You don't understand. If I married him he would have become President."</p>
<p>More seriously, did Hillary go the Yale Law in part because she went to Wellesley? Maybe, but can't say for sure. I friend of our family went to Michigan State, got all A's, and on to Harvard Law. Maybe if he had gone to a "better" school undergrad he would have been in the middle of his class and been rejected at Harvard, or never even applied. I don't want to discuss here which path would have made him more money.</p>