The above seems to be a good question to ask at the end of a week that was full of dashed hopes, broken dreams, and relatively few tears of joy.
http://alex-reid.net/2015/04/does-it-matter-where-you-go-to-college.html
And here is the link to the Atlantic story:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/the-3-percent-crisis/389396/
PS I’d like to know more about knowing how to figure out a 99.7 percentile on the SAT, but that is for another day or year!
It doesn’t matter where you go to college. I graduated from an academic wasteland (as stated by the OP), and I have a job and can support myself very easily. I know others who graduated from “prestigious” Universities who are making the same or less than me who now owe thousands of dollars in student loans.
@xiggi what is the study that was done that states students selected to Ivies who instead attended other schools were as successful? I couldn’t find that quickly.
Krueger and Dale did a few of those studies.
In any case, where you go to college may matter more or less (or not at all), and it depends a lot on your career field, geographic area, as well as your personal attributes.
It depends GREATLY by what you mean by something “mattering.”
I propose an experiment, let’s take half of the 2019 incoming class at Yale and make them go to UConn, half the Stanford class to UCSB, half the Harvard class to UMass etc.
20 years later, we can compare the success, incomes, etc.of these two groups.
My hypothesis is that there would be little difference. These are all highly intelligent, motivated young people who will succeed no matter which university they attend.
To make it more interesting, we should also take the top 10% of students from each of these public universities and put them in their corresponding HYPSM school and compare their outcomes.
I believe that success is much more a product of the individual than the educational institution. Are the top 10% of students at UMass less likely to succeed than the average Ivy Student? I don’t buy that.
Unabomber vs Tsarnaev. Yep, that works for flipping UMass and Harvard.
By the way, it is about where students could have attended. That requires being admitted. Your examples do not follow that as the chances for the second set of students from UConn, UCSB, and UMass are as high as Harvard winning the NCAA football title in this decade.
Those who did not attend prestigious schools will almost always say that it doesn’t matter, regardless of what studies show.
Hahahah. Yes,HappyAlumnus. Additionally those that did attend prestigious schools will insist it did matter.
It creates too much cognitive dissonance to say you made a mistake, that your choice was not as important as you wanted it to be especially if a boatload of cash was involved.
Whats the biggest overlooked factor in Ivy and top school success? To me, its the amount of money your family has and the connections your family already has and can use to their and your advantage.
It’s parents with enough money to buy into your start up or parents that can hook you up with some free advice from professionals or parents who get you those impressive internships. It’s parents that can get you into research in the hospitals where they work or where their friends work.
It’s parents with political connections or parents connected with the entertainment business etc.
Control for these. It would be interesting.
And yes folks, of course we can come up with examples of kids making it on their own.
But in general my money is on parents wealth and connections for making the biggest difference in outcomes of prestigious school graduates vs others.
@sax, you’re welcome to your views. People who went to “elite” schools will generally say that going to an “elite” school was worth it; so we agree there; people who didn’t go to “elite” schools will generally say that where you go to college doesn’t matter. These types of threads generally end up like that.
That is why you need to do my experiment - to prove or disprove whether it really matters. Otherwise it is just your opinion vs. mine.
FWIW, I went to fairly prestigious but not Ivy schools, UNC and Vanderbilt. Would I have been less successful if I had gone undergrad to a lower tier school like U South Carolina? I really don’t think so.
@leftygolf, your test has been done in real life, and there have been numerous studies of the employment and other effects of college attended.
This is turning into another “elite college or not” thread. How many of those do we really need?
I see it and hear it all the time, lot here on CC too. “It doesn’t matter where you go to school”. Yet, some of those same posters whose kids were later accepted to Ivies/Prestigious schools are the first to post "My kid got into IVY/Prestigious School.
Either it matters or it doesn’t. Don’t use it conveniently.
At the end of the day, none of us can say how we would have performed at another school, because we just don’t know.
Lettygolf, look again at the numbers:
The raw numbers are instructive. There are more than 4 million 18-year-olds in the United States. About 3.5 million of them will go to college. And just 100,000 to 150,000 of those—somewhere around 3 percent of the entire age group—go each year to selective schools that admit fewer than half of their applicants.
Do you think your experiment would work for 3.5MM South Carolina type students? Or even for your 350,000 in the top percent?
Chances it might work for a fraction of your 350,000 and almost for none of the remaining of the 3,500,000. And that is why the chasm between the have and have-nots is deepening, both in terms of intellectual and financial capabilities.
Truly talented people can and do emerge from less prestigious environments, but in far smaller numbers and percentages than their peers who did chose their parents better. And this despite the fact the number of the advantaged people is much, much smaller.
Perhaps because they have proven, through their own accomplishments, that it’s not “necessary”? I’m not sure why that’s so difficult for you to comprehend…
If someone has succeeded at a non-elite college and done well for themselves, why do you continue to blather about elite schools being necessary? It has already been proven that it’s not necessary.
Does this conversation really never get old?
Eh, nevermind, who wants to share the popcorn with me?
The problem is that everybody’s definition of success is different. Success in my book would be an astronaut, the head of a spaceflight company like Elon Musk, a top designer for a cool spacecraft or airplane, or a record setting pilot. Prestige may help get those things - Elon Musk graduated from UPenn. Lots of astronauts and top pilots are from the service Academies, unquestionably elite institutions. Did it help them? Sure it did. But does it mean that one cannot become those things without going to that tier of school? No. There are astronauts from less prestigious backgrounds, and there are probably CEOs that are too. Engineers can come from all kinds of backgrounds and become designers. Coming from MIT or Cornell may certainly help, but people from Somewhere State U or #57 on the U.S. News list of top engineering schools probably can find plenty of opportunities. Opportunities meaning decent paying jobs that people can live on and support a family if need be.
But for someone wanting to be a teacher, a medical professional, in big finance (I know, overused), law, sports, etc., etc… that definition of success may be wildly different. And it may be wildly different between two people interested in the same area.
A study by Mark Schneider, former director of the national center for education statistics, says that what you major in matters far more than where you go to school:
Now that admissions decisions are in, worry less about where you were accepted and more about what you are planning to study.
Exactly. I know people who went to "elite"schools and people who went to state schools. Some people who went to state schools got the same paying jobs out of college who went to “elite” schools.
If you think it’s worth it and can afford to write a check for $40k a year, then do it. If you’re happy at paying 1/4 of that at a state school, then do it.