<p>cbreeze, I was referring to my college, not to Penn or Wharton. In all honesty, in my day Wharton was significantly less prestigious than the College at Penn, and in my community, rightly or wrongly, was seen as a sort of second-rate, back-door Ivy League option. Other than a friend of mine from high school who sells insurance, and a few people who inherited their positions, I don’t know any Wharton grads in my cohort who were super-successful without getting an MBA or going to law school. </p>
<p>I do agree that such people exist, however. And that engineers can be successful with nothing but a bachelor’s degree (although the ones I know all have more). It’s far from impossible to succeed without a graduate degree. But for the kind of students who populate HYPS, it’s uncommon enough to make it really hard to judge exactly what those schools mean in the employment world.</p>
<p>I think it can make a difference for young people who have less privileged backgrounds because they graduate with hopefully some networks in place that their families did not have. But for those young people with strong family and friends networks it matters less. It matters more for young people who need to develop adult social skills and other EQ traits that are needed to be successful in interviews and through a career advancement and it matters less for those young people who enter college with those social skills in place. I think that was true for my generation and I think it’s true for this generation, but like others have suggested it really depends on your perspective.</p>
<p>Anecdotal, in my social group we parents are split between those that went to elite prep schools and on to elite colleges and non-elite colleges and those that went to public high schools and went on to elite and non-elite colleges. The only common thread is we all grew up in upper middle class or wealthy families. We are all pretty much at the same place now sociology-economically if not in as good of shape as our parents, we’re all comfortable. Our kids are following similar paths - some to elite prep schools and on to elite or non-elite colleges, some to public high school and on to elite and non-elite colleges. The ones that graduated colleges 2-5 years ago also seem to be in the same place socio-economically (not weathly by any means but not dependent on parents) and I suspect that the trajectory will continue on through their lives…assuming “success” is equated with enough money to maintain a lifestyle they grew up accustomed to… and assuming none of them drop out/tune out/become criminals.</p>
<p>Momof3 ^ brings up a truism - although upward mobility is possible through a college degree from a fine school - socio-economic status of the family is a far greater predictor of success.</p>
<p>That’s true to the degree that students at an elite college “mix” with those of other social classes. A friend of mine was astonished last winter when she was visiting her sister over winter break. Her nephew and his friend (both graduates of an exclusive DC day school) came in and they started talking. The friend, a student at Yale, said he was excited about going on a study-abroad program but disappointed that he was going to be rooming with the “financial-aid kids.”</p>
<p>While this is only a single anecdote, I think it speaks to the issue of social mobility within “elite” environments. People don’t just leave their preferences and assumptions about others at the entrance to the college they attend.</p>
<p>JHS, I don’t know when you graduated from college. As far back as 1900’s, all the foreign students from China mainly went to Ivy Leagues and MIT because they were the only ones that had any kind of international reputation. Many went to Wharton, then went back to China after graduation and became immensely successful before the Communist takeover.
I know of an immediate family member who also went to Wharton as a foreign student in the 1940’s and I asked him why he chose Wharton from half a world away and he said it was recognized then as the world’s best business school.Warren Buffett was enrolled there briefly around the same time.
Now, in the 1960’s and 70’s and even early 80’s, Philadelphia, especially where Penn is located was deemed as extremely unsafe, downright dangerous and Penn as a whole lost its popularity. I was discouraged from applying.</p>
<p>In the last two decades when people in finance especially investment banking are making unreasonably amounts of money, Wharton is again viewed as the path to riches.Of course, no every Whartonite does well, but a majority of them are very successful without ever needing a second degree if they continue in the type of work related to their concentration.</p>
<p>As has been said many times on CC, though, “what they think of it in China” has little to do with reputation in the US. The opinions of people who don’t really know what they’re talking about, but rely on hearsay and the attitude of “if I’ve not heard of it, it can’t be any good” are irrelevant to students in the US. </p>
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<p>Doesn’t anyone have any sense as how tacky it is to define “success” as “making super riches”? An investment banker making $2 MM isn’t “more successful in life” than the guy making $200,000 in corporate America. He just has more money for playthings. That’s all.</p>
<p>cbreeze, yes, Wharton was always the best of the undergraduate business schools, but traditionally, for American undergraduate education, that was like saying it was the tallest dwarf. When I was in high school, in the early 1970s, well before the financial industry boom of the 1980s, “business” as a major was seen as inherently second-rate, something for students who lacked the intellectual capacity to study more rigorous subjects and to translate what they learned to real-world activities without having it spoon-fed to them. Graduate business programs – MBAs – were enjoying a rise in prestige, having gone through practically a revolution in the 1960s in upgrading the academic credentials and reputations of their faculties, and ultimately that translated into increased prestige for undergraduate programs. But, in my high school class, the people who went into business programs were the very bottom of the class, except for one guy from the middle of the class who went to Wharton. My college offered a few business-oriented classes in its Economics Department, and de facto three-quarters of the seats were reserved for starters on the football and hockey teams who were having trouble maintaining their academic standing.</p>
<p>I did two internship stints at JP Morgan (then Morgan Guaranty) when I was in college. At the time, it was the absolute gold standard institution in global finance, located at the corner of Wall and Broad. There were lots of Wharton MBAs there – above a certain level, everyone had an MBA either from Wharton or from Harvard – but not a single person with just a Wharton undergraduate degree. BAs from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Williams, Amherst, yes, even one person from Stanford. But no Wharton, at least not that I met. (And it wasn’t that big a place then.)</p>
<p>I am not dissing Wharton. Things have changed a lot in the past 40 years, and Wharton now attracts absolutely first-rate students. And I can’t dispute that it had prestige in China 40-50 years ago, because I wouldn’t know. But I can tell you authoritatively that it had rather wan prestige in the near Midwest in the early 1970s.</p>
<p>Ha! That perception was also common among most of my Chinese-born older relatives in my Chinese-American extended family. Even among the pre-professional side, undergrad business was viewed as the major for the “less intellectually/academically inclined”. </p>
<p>It also seemed to be the mentality of one financial services firm I worked for as they made it a point not to hire undergrad business majors unless they came from the very elite undergrad business programs like Wharton or NYU-Stern. </p>
<p>Granted, a large part of that came from having been burned by undergrad b-school majors from regional/lower-tiered colleges due to abysmal basic written communication and math skills.</p>
Looking at the demographics of the students enrolled in those colleges, apparently many ethnic groups also consider those colleges are worthy to attend.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, yes your opinions on Asian’s choices of Ivy like colleges are well-known. So, time for you to carry on other topics.</p>
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<p>That’s dependent on how you define “successful”. At the same time isn’t it tacky of you to infer that someone making $200K is more successful than someone making let’s say $120K? or even $60K? There are many people considered very successful in other parts of the country if they earn $60K</p>
<p>Yes, but “successful” to me is a 20-30 who isn’t living in the basement of my house and is self sufficient enough to pay their own bills, has a roof over their head, and food on their table without monthly hand-outs from the ‘rents.’ How “successful” someone is from 25-40 is really dependent on the person by then. That was true in the last generation and that is true in this generation. You can send the kid to an Ivy full ride, but if they are incapable of standing on their own two feet that is not successful…same for a kid in a directional public. The kids have to be able to hit the pavement after the diploma and network their way into a job and THAT has nothing to do with the college they go to. Now grant you, if the college happens to attract a line-up of recruiters then they’ve just made it easier but it’s still the kid that is going to determine if they get a job etc. etc.</p>