<p>I've become rather college obsessed lately, but I'm beginning to grasp how overrated admission humping is. </p>
<p>As many have stated, the vast majority of global dominators attended state school, in addition to other famous-human begins who have been/are prized by media and the public. </p>
<p>Anyways, what do you guys think? In the grand scheme of things, will it really matter if you attended Chico State or UCLA? Most importantly, will anyone aside from yourself really care?</p>
<p>Not really. My dad went to a state college and he's more successful than probably half the people that came out of Harvard. If you want to know what he does, PM me :)</p>
<p>If you suck at life going to Harvard won't help.</p>
<p>If you are amazing at life going to a state school won't help.</p>
<p>If your amazing at life and go to Harvard, then that will help (bring out your potential, that is)</p>
<p>College is a means, not an end.</p>
<p>Plus, in the future, when someone briefs over your resume (this is cited from an actual case i read somewhere else) and if they see you just went to the state school then they are like "whatever" and skips over it without thinking of anything, while if they see "Princeton University" then they instantly think "This guy is a genius!!!!!!" (unless something else puts them off).</p>
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Plus, in the future, when someone briefs over your resume (this is cited from an actual case i read somewhere else) and if they see you just went to the state school then they are like "whatever" and skips over it without thinking of anything, while if they see "Princeton University" then they instantly think "This guy is a genius!!!!!!" (unless something else puts them off).
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<p>That's a bunch of bull, which my dad, a CEO at a publicly traded company and state school (not UVA, UMich, Cal, UNC, etc.) grad puts into perspective. He doesnt overlook people based on where they went or didnt go. He reads work experience first, not where they went to college.</p>
<p>It doesnt matter where you went, it matters how qualified you are, what kind of character you have, a multitude of things that arent determined by what undergraduate institution you went to.</p>
<p>I bought into the hype of going to a private school and quickly figured out it's not my crowd and $200,000 for an undergrad education is a waste of money.</p>
<p>I always have to laugh at the story of the MIT grad who's a cab driver.</p>
<p>The college does matter when it comes to your major.</p>
<p>Remember you are going to enter at the "entry level" Going to Harvard will not help if you want to be a Fashion Design..go to Parsons or Philly.
Cornell is well known for architecture.
Certain state schools have phenomenal science fields that are highly recognized.
UNC, UVA are considered top tier schools and would be very competitve when graduation and employment comes.</p>
<p>Recruiters go to those colleges that are applicable with their hiring goals.</p>
<p>SO yes, it does matter to get your foot in the door. After your there it is all up to you. </p>
<p>Boston, dad doesn't do the hiring or recruiting at an entry level that is why he doesn't look. If he is involved in the hiring process I am sure it is at a senior management level, thus, again it is what you do when you are in the work force.</p>
<p>It is now Philadelphia University, but was formerly known as Philadelphia College of Textiles and Sciences. If you go into the Textile world, which includes everything from fashion to textile design (many grads work for GM designing the fabrics for cars) this is where you place on your list</p>
<p>If your goal is to attend graduate school and go into academics, your undergraduate institution matters to the extent that it is able to place its graduates in desirable graduate programs. The ability to do that depends on availability of professors to undergraduates, research opportunities, and sufficient rigor of the curriculum that graduate programs have some confidence that students are prepared for their graduate classes. Many less than illustrious public universities, including unheralded flagships from less populated states, are able to fill this bill.</p>
<p>Last week I was at a Christmas party at which I met two young new university faculty members. One was a new PhD from Stanford, the other was a new PhD from MIT. As it happens, my husband was involved in hiring these people--they are not in his primary department, but he is an adjunct for the multi-disciplinary program which hired them. I asked H where these two earned their undergraduate degrees, and he couldn't remember! He said one was from "somewhere good, but I can't remember where" and the other had worked for a number of years at a think tank in DC after undergrad, and that was of interest to the hiring committee, but where he went to undergrad was irrelevant. Main point here: there are a lot of good reasons to go to an undergraduate school with a great reputation, but it is what you do afterwards that matters for an academic career.</p>
<p>I could write for an hour or more with examples of faculty with undergrad. degrees from Harvard who will retire without ever making full prof, others with undergrad. degrees from mid-level state flagships who are advisers to presidential candidates and/or profs at top institutions. I've seen two just in recent years with undergrad degrees from MIT who were refused tenure at a mid-ranked dept of a medium-ranked public. Yes, these are anecdotes, but there are an awful lot of them, and they add up to my conclusion that it is not irrelevant where you go to school for your undergraduate degree, but it is only one small part of the big picture.</p>
<p>It is not irrelevant. If nothing else, many companies like to be able to brag that they have alums of name schools to impress customers. It matters in terms of whether recruiters seek your college out. Also, where you go to college will affect the experience that you have in college, the way your personality and academic choices are shaped by that experience. I do not think that I would be in the field that I am now had I attended any other school to which I was accepted (with one possible exception) or any of my in-state publics.</p>
<p>If you want to go to academia (in which case, you're often told that "where you go for undergrad doesn't matter"), a name school can help in terms of grad school placement. There's a CMU computer science prof who has sat on admissions committees for three different top 10 computer science PhD programs, who wrote a great essay on grad school admissions. On this topic, he says, and I quote, "A 3.4 GPA from a top-ranked CS undergraduate program like CMU counts the same as a 3.8 or 3.9 GPA from a less well-known CS undergraduate program."</p>
<p>It is not, however, the be-all-end-all. Successful (and unsuccessful) people come from all sorts of college backgrounds. On balance, it is probably less important for overall life success for most people than it is made out to be in middle-class American society, but more important than the naysayers tend to portray it.</p>
<p>Students should also realize that the generally famous schools are not necessarily the biggest names in their field of choice. My dad, an actuary in the metro Atlanta area, has told me that the firms there love Georgia State grads (note: a school not even considered the flagship public), and recruit heavily there, because it has one of the best actuarial science programs in the world.</p>
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"A 3.4 GPA from a top-ranked CS undergraduate program like CMU counts the same as a 3.8 or 3.9 GPA from a less well-known CS undergraduate program."
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<p>I don't disagree with that. If you choose (for whatever reason) to attend a lower-ranked program, make sure you are one of the very best. That is how you get the attention of the faculty who will be writing your letters of recommendation, whether they be for grad school or immediate employment.</p>
<p>Another anecdote. My husband went to an interview with a company that near Princeton. There are a lot of people with Phd from Princeton and even the top guy. Part of the interview is to make a presentation of his research subject from which he received lots of patents. He did not get the job( I think in hindsight it was a good thing). But many years later he discovered one of the top guy who graduated with a Phd from Princeton, who also refused to hire him, stole some of his ideas and called it his. He published the paper using some of that presentation and my husband accidently googled and found it. So yeah, even a Phd from Princeton does not guarantee that you can generate your own ideas from scratch. It's the years that you spend working on something that will help you see better ways of solving things and generate ideas that are unique and patentable.</p>
<p>I think you guys miss the point of most "more prestigious" universities: the liberal arts, or the idea that an education creates thinkers, not professionals. While the price tags tend to be hefty, and obviously you want the option of a great job/ grad school after graduation, who's to say that the cab-driving MIT grad ever regrets his education? Less prestigious universities focus on job-placement; more prestigious, on the caliber of the education.</p>
<p>Obviously, other factors come into play here--like, of course you NEED a job--but it's just something to take into account.</p>
<p>The post above nails it--learning for the sake of learning is so terribly scarce in the vast majority of this generation's incarnations of "institutes of higher learning." I believe the most prestigious universities/colleges are those who, according to some adage whose origin I can't quite place, "train you for nothing, but prepare you for anything."</p>
<p>There are different aspects to this question.</p>
<p>The first is your potential employer. Obviously where you got your degree is different if you're trying to become a brain surgeon or if you're going into writing.</p>
<p>The second "Does anyone care what college I went to" is directed towards actual people. And if you meet someone who judges you based on your college, I think it's time to end that contact pretty damn quickly.</p>