Elite/Ivy grads really do earn more? (new study)

Parents Forum
201

The purpose of my story was to basically show that you need not be a perfect/ultra brilliant student even while in college. You may develop (people seem to want to skip this portion especially if it means risk taking or even screwing up from time to time. Development should instead mean near perfection at all times) during and after it, and other attributes can come to the fore in determining future success in whatever. I may be among “top” learners as quantified by test scores, but it certainly is nowhere near the very top and I don’t view myself as a particularly elite student (I almost feel more comfortable identifying with 1%ers for some reason). I like learning and I work hard when I am passionate about something (as I am now in my research and teaching duties). Many imperfect people (bottom 1% or not) can have such qualities and can succeed (and do) even in I guess, what are considered objectively difficult disciplines especially if they are resilient and have some desire. This latter part is what many lack. They think that if they don’t get everything right the first time or that if they do not start off well above average in something, then they should just give up. You may not have the perfect, smooth path to success(as I didn’t nor was I expected to statistically. I am a very low income first generation URM student who just happened to value learning and reading, and now math much more), but you can eventually get where you want to go. All of our talk sounds as if it assumes that if we weren’t ridiculously amazing when young, then there is severely limited ability to do bi things later or to develop into something great. My arguments stem from my simple idea that if something claims to be “elite” and is serving an “elite” client base, then its product should actually be fairly uniformly elite (as opposed to pretending and harboring). Even “elite” learners can and perhaps should be developed more (no, an SAT in the 2000s, high or low, should not mean they have reached some pinnacle of intellectual development) educationally in these environments that claim to do so, but there are too many pressures and loopholes preventing it.

Basically, if it doesn’t come easy, it isn’t worth their time and effort (perhaps what US k-12 ingrains in our heads). Sadly, this mentality is even present among so called “elite” students, so even they are more compelled to play games with their education. Many may not even need external pressures like stringent standards for professional school and job placement. The thought of struggling or failing at anything for any point in time is enough to completely deter people which is interesting, since it seems that before ultra grade inflation and spikes in SAT scores at many schools, especially elites, it seems many kind of just “got over” not having near perfect GPAs or even all As and Bs in college. I suspect a conglomerate of things have contributed to a “meekening” (made up word lol) of even some of the best test takers. Many are to blame I suppose. Nothing we can do now. All I can control is my individual contributions in teaching and mentoring.

@Canuckguy : I have to wonder if standardized tests correlate with success in certain workplaces due to a correlation with obedience and ability to do tasks that are somewhat challenging but not necessarily requiring creativity or a vision. Standardized tests can be significantly coached (some elite students may take it more than 2 or 3 times) to the point where there is a large degree of predictability. I guess it could indicate how easily one is trained for skills at a certain level of cognitive complexity.

202

@Madaboutx : I essentially agree with all of that, except I, of course, question the academic rigor part. That seems more important for those pursuing PhD’s or less stats sensitive post-grad options that can be extremely challenging (maybe MBAs? But even then, many top MBAs expect and evaluate based on post-grad. job performance). Many less prestigious schools (especially more teaching intensive schools) can have similar rigor to many elite R-1s, but I of course lean more toward what you said about branding, because it is going to make a difference in terms of which school is more favored. Even differences in perception of any type of elite institution versus another is governed by this. The two schools could be equal or the slightly less prestigious one could be slightly stronger academically (not in coming stats but major and course offerings, rigor, etc), but reputation can lag severely if branding is not great. I went to such a school (branding and marketing is comparatively terrible versus even closely ranked peers!). I’ll admit that the branding of places like Ivies did not come from nowhere , but it is so effective that even “lower” Ivies will outperform many extremely comparable (even comparably ranked) non-Ivies popularity and perhaps even placement wise (If you aren’t a non-Ivy in the top 10 or so, you have to typically throw lots of merit and need-based aid to draw students away from the Ivies below 10 unless you are say Georgetown or Berkeley which have very distinct halo effects of their own). The “Ivy” despite the fact that the Ivies are so different from each other (other than being great in comparison to most US universities) has become its own brand.

203

It’s interesting to me the importance that athletic conferences play in the branding process. There’s an immediate image associated with conferences like the Ivy League, B1G, SEC, even NESCAC that extends well beyond sports.

So, with that in mind, go UAA! (That’s the University Athletic Association—Brandeis, CMU, CWRU, UChicago, URoch, Emory, NYU, WashU. Or, as it has been labeled, the “egghead eight.”)

204

"My understanding is that standardized tests is the best predictor of academic/work place success (r=.5 or higher). "

Really, honestly. There are plenty of people who didn’t break 600 on their math SATs, who are now in the bottom half of the 1% (and the top half too, but we weren’t talking about them). They were indifferent In calculus class if they took it at all. They couldn’t tell you anything about physics or astronomy other than Saturn is the one with the rings and Pluto is no longer a planet. Their knowledge of chemistry is that the housekeeper shouldn’t mix the bleach and the ammonia. And their knowledge of biology is that it seems a little sketchy when two blue eyed parents produce a brown eyed son.

Blossom gave you great examples. These people do great jobs, do their jobs well; and earn all the money they receive, are good stewards of their community and families, and God bless them.

205

Bernie, you need to get out more.

Seriously.

Standardized tests are a reasonable predictor of work place success for a very narrow slice of jobs at an even tinier group of companies, when COMBINED with other factors. By themselves they are weak predictors, and in some cases, useless.

I am not aware of any company which hires solely by scores. Not a one, and I know lots of employers which use test scores but combined with other things.

Your view of reality is quite skewed. And “Ivy” is only a brand to high school students.

You are trying to explain the world with a shaky grasp of how things work, and are extrapolating from a tiny bit of data. And the notion that standardized tests correlate with obedience- take a social science or psychology course one day so you understand how to use data correctly.

206

My father had a high school education. My mother completed grade 6. Started dabbling in real estate in the 1960s, they managed to build a small portfolio of properties. In short, they have done extremely well, if you know anything about Toronto property value.

There was no family life to speak of. We all had to pitch in- painting and doing small repairs, answering the phone, moving furniture, prepare documents for court etc. They did this after a full shift in a blue collar job, and for us, after school. It was a hard, hard life.

They wanted us to go to college so we do not have to work as hard. We all agreed. Over the years, very few people I met who have done well did it through entrepreneurship. Most of those people fail. Instead, the ones who have done well are usually very intelligent, well educated, and work in fields where a transfer of value occurs- occupations that allow them to latch on to successful producers for a cut, whether the producers succeed or fail (Law, banking, consulting come to mind).

This is not very romantic, but it is reality.

@Much2learn Your post is a much better description of the study than mine. My game plan, try to get into the most elite college you can and study as difficult a STEM as you can handle, still holds.

@bernie12 I highly recommend this TED talk that I have posted numerous times. It was given by one of the world’s leading authority in organizational and occupational psychology and cuts through a lot of nonsense we hear from popular media:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv_Cr1a6rj4

Once again, this is not very romantic, but it is reality.

207

I beg to differ that the Ivy League is only a brand in the world of high school. One can claim that those schools are not the end all, be all of colleges, but the brand had a strong place in our culture, including in literature, TV and film.

208

@TheGFG : I agree. They are so well branded, that in movies, when undergraduate culture is depicted at an elite college it is almost always an Ivy League or in some cases Stanford. Most other elite privates and even some publics tend to be featured architecturally but are then used in place of the Ivy (like JHU in the Social Network was used in place of Harvard. JHU gets lucky sometimes and is featured in the roles it is stereotyped for, medical related things) or even schools that are technically less prestigious or non-existent (or unknown). Even in the 80s, when Real Genius was out, Caltech was called something else. It seems relatively rare that non-Ivy/MIT/Stanford elites are featured heavily in the media, even in something like the news, at least not for interesting positive/neutral things (they are more likely to be featured if caught up in political culture or scandal. However, lately media has been giving almost all elite privates grief about political culture more so than everything else). It just seems that Ivies and a couple of other schools have been used disproportionately to represent elite school culture in the US. It is obviously for a reason (because people know about them so much). Interestingly, when it comes to films, usually they are not condoned by the universities unless they are all positive, so their frequency of being featured also reflects their level of branding and people wanting to make use them as portion of a storyline or tell about stories that happen at such places.

Unless you play some big role in sports or have a very notable campus culture that depicts stereotypical college/campus life (USC, which is rarely featured as itself) then expect to be rarely featured and definitely do not expect to be a central aspect of a story if you are an elite school.

209

I read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal daily; the Washington Post a few times a week; LA Times at least once a week along with the Boston Globe. Plus my consumption of “trash”- TMZ and People and the like.

I think someone from Mars who showed up and read what I read would conclude that Penn State, USC, Georgetown, Notre Dame, and the entire Big 10 were the most important and prominent “brands” in higher education.

But I’m not sure this is terribly relevant or meaningful.

Virtually all of the “really rich” people I know got there via some form of entrepreneurship. Maybe that’s the difference between the US and Canada. Canuck- surely you know someone who studied STEM and was an abject failure at it? The advice to study STEM to become a member of the 1% doesn’t work for someone whose brain isn’t wired that way. Sure- a kid who can’t get into Med school after numerous attempts can likely get into chiropractice or OT or PT or another allied health field. But none of these (in the US) pay 1% type salaries. And a mediocre math student- you aren’t deluding yourself that this kid is becoming a Quant at DE Shaw (where top of the 1% fortunes can be made) after a mediocre college math career???

A kid who doesn’t want to or can’t excel at STEM should excel at something else. Period full stop. I know plenty of mediocre accountants whose math skills weren’t good enough for actual math- but whose parents insisted on something “math related”. The world doesn’t need another mediocre accountant- and frankly, since those jobs don’t pay that well, why bother?

Why not tell your kid to figure out what he/she could be GREAT at, instead of shoehorning into STEM if that’s not where his/her interests lie?

Who could believe that I could have had a successful corporate career (terrible in math, would never have attempted STEM in college) after being a Classics major? Who would have hired me as a terrible STEM student? I graduated magna cum laude- at least I had a story to tell. (for a while every interviewer wanted me to speak to them in Latin. That was fun- even though I studied Ancient Greek).

210

The problem with this is that kids don’t yet know what they’re great at before college (or even several years into it). If you see that your HS kid has the mental chops to be in a high paying field like STEM but isn’t apparently super-interested in it, what do you do?

211

@droppedit “The problem with this is that kids don’t yet know what they’re great at before college (or even several years into it). If you see that your HS kid has the mental chops to be in a high paying field like STEM but isn’t apparently super-interested in it, what do you do?”

That is a great question. What is the best way to approach this for the kid who has broad strengths, and no idea what they want to do?

  1. Keep your options open. Taking advanced math classes is critical to keeping all options open.
  2. Begin to discuss choices of majors and what types of jobs and salaries those majors really lead to.
  3. A critical component of understanding what graduates in a particular major are really doing, is to understand the percent of students in particular majors are unemployed or underemployed. That does not mean that they should not choose a major with high under-employment, but to me it does suggest that the bar should be set higher.
  4. Develop a plan to explore/investigate some options that interest the student (take a class, join a club, do something in the summer, talk to some people who do that etc.)
212

Yep.

  1. Talk about stuff and have them shadow or volunteer to get an idea of what various jobs entail in HS. Work-related EC’s.
  2. Gap year after HS trying out different jobs/volunteering.
  3. Possibly CC taking different classes. In HS or after. Or pick a cheap college where they can try out different majors.

The idea is to challenge and hone skills and get an idea of what drives you in a low risk environment without burning out.

213

I realize that I grew up in the dark ages. But part of what allowed someone like me to pivot from Classics to Corporate was that I had been working since I was 13. Babysitting, then finally old enough for “real jobs” like waitressing. Worked all through college and no- not internships- paid work. Some boring, some tedious, some greasy. Interviewers seemed excited that I knew what it meant to deal with cranky customers and overbearing bosses and moronic cash register procedures and ridiculous security measures (meant to protect the store from the employees, and NOT the employees from criminals!) That’s how I ended up in an executive training program- I knew what it took to manage a big team of hourly employees because I had been one. I understood how important inventory procedures were in retail because I had DONE inventory- with a clipboard, counting paper cups and cartons of napkins.

But that was the olden days. None of my kids are working in jobs which existed when they were in HS. It would have been very hard for them to figure out a career at that point. But they always worked. Dumb jobs, dirty jobs, stupid jobs. You want to convince an employer post-college that you know how to work? By pointing to all the jobs you’ve already held- and be able to explain what you learned from them. The customer is always right. The boss isn’t always the smartest person in the room but he or she is still the boss. Procedures exist for a reason-- either compliance insisted on them, or inventory control, or a regulator somewhere, or the bank which holds the bonds. Being honest always pays off- if you short change your customer by a nickel you have lost every nickel and dime and dollar which would have followed. Etc.

I find this focus on “the only well paying jobs in STEM” to be very sad. Don’t you think people who lead large teams at advertising agencies and airlines and reinsurance companies make solid salaries? There are so many interesting jobs at interesting companies doing cool things-- why is becoming a third rate STEM person better than becoming a first rate something else?

214

"I find this focus on “the only well paying jobs in STEM” to be very sad. Don’t you think people who lead large teams at advertising agencies and airlines and reinsurance companies make solid salaries? "

The STEM-uber-alles folks really don’t get this, blossom. There was someone on a thread once who thought of PR kind of like acting - catch-as-catch-can career prospects - most people earn not a penny and a few earn stratospheric salaries. No clue that the PR or account executives or account planners or media buyers have career paths just like anyone else, from associate to manager to director to VP or whatever. With raises and benefits and performance reviews. No different from the associate at McKinsey, really.

215

“They wanted us to go to college so we do not have to work as hard. We all agreed. Over the years, very few people I met who have done well did it through entrepreneurship. Most of those people fail. Instead, the ones who have done well are usually very intelligent, well educated, and work in fields where a transfer of value occurs- occupations that allow them to latch on to successful producers for a cut, whether the producers succeed or fail (Law, banking, consulting come to mind”

My father dropped out of high school, canuckguy, and got his GED while serving in Vietnam. He started as a buyer in retail and worked his way up to president of a pretty good size company. He was never the “student” type. I bet he wouldn’t break 600 on the math SATs. But he had types of intelligence you completely fail to acknowledge/recognize are as important, if not more important, than the ability to solve a differential equation. He learned from mentors how to present himself in an upper middle class world that he didn’t come from. He has an astute eye for fashion, designs, and trends, and was responsible for several trends/brands you would have heard of. He establishes rapport with all kinds of people and could sell anything to anybody - strike that, people meet him and they want to buy from him.

You know what engineering he needed to do? “Hey, the production line in the XYZ plant isn’t keeping up with demand. Someone needs to get on that, stat, and report back to me what the plan is.” Done.

Through that, we’ve known a lot of very wealthy people who didn’t get there through STEM in the least. Lots of people in retail - and I’m drawing that broadly, including things like restaurant chains or high-end salons.

Since I “grew up” career-wise in consumer packaged goods, I always inwardly laugh at the irony that the supposed elite job is the firm who gets hired to consult, not the company that actually creates products or services worth selling in the first place and who HAS the $ to hire McK et al. (Lots of my friends are McK people and McK partnered with my old firm. I love them. Great people. But not gods, and no smarter than the people who hire them.)

Honestly, some people just need to shake off the dust from the science lab every now and then. It’s a big world out there. Open your eyes.

216

Oh yes, there is definitely more than one way to skin a cat and STEM is just one road to career success. That said, I don’t think our personal success stories or those of our parents are terribly relevant. When my parents were young, very few people had a college education and the ones that didn’t got along just fine in small town PA without one. One reason is that back then there were well-paying blue collar jobs and some white collar jobs didn’t require a degree like they do today. For example, the man next door rose almost all the way up the ranks in the local bank without a degree; he eventually became the president after earning a degree in night school. Even so, if you did get a degree your earning potential was generally higher, all else being equal. Only the eldest of my father’s brothers got to go to college, and he had a much higher standard of living than his siblings who were factory foremen and the like. Now, his job would require a PhD, though. By the time I entered high school, the factories where my uncles used to work had closed down or relocated overseas. Even so, a college education of any variety could still get you an average job that sort of paid the bills, but you were still much better off in the job market if you had specific skills or technical knowledge. The engineers definitely ruled the roost at our college career center, although even some of them didn’t get jobs.

Our children, however, are facing a totally different world and I, for one, don’t have the answers as to what they will require in order to do as well as we did and hopefully much better. I just know that so far my kids have needed to work much harder in general, have taken higher level classes in high school and college, have needed extensive internship experience while in college, and one will definitely need a master’s degree just to get an entry-level position in her field. Those manufacturing jobs are still gone too, and with them a lot of the average jobs my generation held with just a bachelor’s degree. As for the bank, I’m pretty sure you need some college education just to be a teller. Personally, I think the fact there are a lot of very bright people with advanced degrees on here skews a bit their perceptions of accessible economic possibilities. Or maybe you all just live somewhere with a better job market.

217

GFG- there is NO question that a new grad is going to need to be geographically mobile to launch. No question in my mind. I counsel kids who are graduating/have graduated on careers and launching and to a person- if you can’t go where the jobs are, you are hobbled from the git-go. Your oncologist doesn’t want you to leave the area? That’s a reasonable reason. You don’t think you would like St. Louis after a lifetime in Great Neck? Get over yourself- or get used to being underemployed if the dream job is in Missouri.

I have colleagues in recruiting who struggle to fill roles in Charlotte and Raleigh and Minneapolis and Salt Lake City. These are all terrific places. I cannot imagine being a new grad and deciding that if you can’t find a job in SF or DC you’d rather sit on mom’s couch and eat cheeto’s.

GFG- my perception of accessible economic possibilities is definitely skewed, because I see the talent maps that large corporations make which show where the jobs are, and where they need to hire. If your neighborhood isn’t hiring the kind of kid you have produced (and yours sound fabulous, btw) then they will need to move. That’s reality. I know it’s sad when a kid grows up in a community and thinks they can replicate mom and dad’s lifestyle but that’s not always the case. When my parents died and my siblings and I sold their house we were shocked- none of us (and we are all professionals in two salary households) could have afforded to live there. And ordinary people used to live on our block- school librarian married to a guy who owned a carpet store.

Things change. Our kids need to be mobile. Hiring targets for many large companies (except for the oil and gas sector- which is in hunker down mode) are up substantially for the first real uptick since 2008. But kids can’t be complacent. They’ve still got to hustle.

And they don’t need to be STEM majors.

218

The point is that with credential creep and the competition from a global economy making it harder to achieve at the level the very same individuals could have in the past, many people legitimately view an elite school education as a way to win in this environment. It seems they’re not totally wrong, based on the OP.

219

Elite education doesn’t mean STEM, and the pool of what is “elite” is going to vary by region, sector of the economy, etc. I’m certainly not saying that where you go doesn’t matter- and long time posters know that i don’t believe that. Sometimes kids need to chase merit aid because that’s the only way they’ll go to college. terrific. And sometimes kids need to chase merit aid because their parents don’t value education, or don’t want to sell the beach house, or can’t give up Aspen at Xmas and Aruba at Easter. Not my money, I don’t get a vote.

But yes, there is a difference between U New Haven and Yale, even though they are down the street from each other. But before I claimed that a kid is going to make more money coming out of Yale, I’d need to meet the kid and would have a LOT more questions.

Where are the strongest alumni networks in the country? In my experience, SMU, Notre Dame, Smith, Villanova, Wisconsin. And the service academies. I could add another 10 colleges to this list before I hit Princeton or Dartmouth. So if it’s important to you that your kid can pick up the phone or drop an email to someone who graduated 10 years before they did to pick their brain, get an informational interview, or ask for a critique of their resume- I don’t think the usual suspects are where you ought to look.

SMU- crazy loyal.

220

@Much2learn : Wouldn’t 1. require the parent or mentor to suggest that the student challenge themselves at the risk of imperfect grades.There are still plenty of parents and students (especially those at selective schools) who may be open to this route, but it seems to be in danger. I think many would split the middle and go with something like an econ. major or a UG business degree in a top UG business program. Pathways that can pay well and likely allow them to finish on top of others with less math aptitude though weirdly enough, I find this kind of malleable. I’m able to teach myself a huge chunk of the math from advanced courses I didn’t take and can now apply them to the science I do or want to learn. Back in undergrad, I didn’t think to erase such deficiencies or enhance what I already had in math perhaps because I bought the hype that aptitude in it seems like a fixed thing. I was only “okay” in it so assumed there was no point in getting better.

My question has always been: how does one encourage talented students to, I guess, explore more options and perhaps engage in “risky” academic development? If they “slip up” one too many times it could start pushing doors closed in other more grade sensitive areas they entertained ( However, I always do wonder whether outcomes would be better for those who only aim for very grade sensitive careers like medicine, and then fail to get there. Their options upon failure could have been more appealing with more rigorous training I suppose and such options could have been used as a leg up if they were to reapply. In such a case, “slipping up” may just mean getting many B grades). Again, it is hard to even convince those with AP credit in an area to push forward with more advanced material even the area is their intended or a potential major especially if they have very specific careers (that are grade sensitive) in mind. They view an attempt to go above and beyond as too risky and rather just ride the curve and/or complete the minimal course requirements for the major. In a major that leads to careers or are connected with professions that pay solidly, it kind of makes sense, though I’ll never be convinced it is a good thing for the intellectual and academic climate in the undergraduate entities of universities. It also seems to dampen the actual development of the students. Limitations are just assumed from the get go. No attempt is ever made to test the waters and see if one can push beyond them. I’m even guilty of it.