Harvard/Yale Law GPA/LSATs

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I agree. I just don't think that brands are as ubuquitious as you suggest. You seem to be arguing that HYPS is always going to be the best bet. I'm arguing that there are times where brand names shift.

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<p>I never said that HYPS are always going to be the best bet. My basic point is that brands have value. Are they the only factor? Of course not. But they are a factor. It's up to the individual to determine how much of a factor they are. But they are a factor. </p>

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This is meaningless to someone who wants a graduate degree. Graduate work, as you know, is far more specific. You don't go to get an MA from SAIS (which is graduate only anyway, like Kennedy) and then "change majors." You already have a career goal in mind.

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<p>Yes, yes, but you know I was focusing on undergrad. </p>

<p>However, I would point out that 'changing majors' even in graduate school is not entirely unheard of. For example, MIT is actually relatively lenient when it comes to graduate students changing fields, which has led to the underground notion that the easiest way to get into a particular MIT graduate program is to already be a graduate student in another program. The graduate intra-transfer process is easier than trying to get admitted from the outside. </p>

<p>Case in point. Take Pepper White, who write "The Idea Factory", an expose on life at MIT. He came in as a MIT graduate student in TPP (Technology and Public Policy). He never graduated with a TPP degree. Instead he ended up graduating with a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering, and even got admitted into the PhD ME program, but he failed his quals. </p>

<p>I also know that at Harvard, master's and doctoral students can actually switch fields if they can demonstrate sufficient justification. For example, I know students who were admitted to the PhD program in Information Technology Management (a program run jointly by Harvard FAS and Harvard Business School) and who later switched into the DBA program in Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School, and also vice versa. Granted, this is not a major shift (the ITM and TOM programs are allied programs), but still, it shows that there is soom room to move around. </p>

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Going to college to get a job should not be the mindset, that is nuts. Going to college to be able to do work that is worthy of a job is the goal. What happened to getting educated? Just so it's clear I am not talking about learning philosophy or anything high-browed, educated in a trade is great and necessary for our society to function. Something useful that doesn't bottleneck our society until the end of time.

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<p>That's highly idealistic of you. But come on. You know and I know that most college students are there because of careerism. Let's face it. If college degrees did not improve career prospects, we both know that most college students would drop out immediately. And far fewer high school seniors would be interested in college. </p>

<p>Like it or not, that's the reality of the situation. Most people go to college because they want to get a decent job. </p>

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An honest person who really sought the best education (by researching a lot in high school and college despite what "brand names" indicate) is now the head of his own business. He looks to use the same paradigm for his employers. This is clearly the practical way to do it for him. But he finds that, under the notion that you must attend a "brand name" school, most capable students (like Sakky) think that they will only get hired if they attend a "brand name" school. So essentially all he has to do is look to these schools. If he weren't so idealistic he wouldn't even have considered this and would've gone straight to the brand name schools!

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<p>Look, the truth is, anybody can get a perfectly decent education just by hanging out at the library and reading lots and lots of books. I myself have often found that it is more pedagogically productive for me to skip class lecture and instead just stay at home and read the book. There really aren't that many things that you can't learn just by reading about it and doing your own labs and experiments and self-practice. </p>

<p>But that's often times not the true value of the college experience. To use econ-speak, the value of a brand-name college is that it sends an economic signal to the market that ameliorates the problems of asymmetric information. By saying that you graduated from Harvard (or SAIS or wherever), you are trying to make a credible signal to employers that you will be an exceptional employee by virtue of the fact that you were able to get into and graduate from Harvard or SAIS or wherever. </p>

<p>To give you an analogy, it's the same rationale for why people want to work for big famous companies for a few years in order to build their resumes. I know lots of people who choose to work at famous companies, but only for a couple of years, before they intend to quit to work elsewhere. They do that because they know that having the name Microsoft or Goldman Sachs or General Electric on their resume looks good. Having that big famous company name on their resume is just another market signal that you were good enough to get hired at that company. Goldman Sachs is not the highest paying investment bank out there. Yet they are able to attract premier talent because of their prestige - people know that the name Goldman Sachs can open doors. Similarly, Microsoft and General Electric (especially GE) are not exceptionally high-paying employers. Yet they are able to attract top-quality talent, again, because of the prestige of working there. It's all the same idea. People know that if you want to have a career in manufacturing, having GE on your resume is better than having the name of some mediocre manufacturing company. </p>

<p>The point is, if you want to decry the careerism that is inherent in this process, feel free to do so. Just understand that you are condemning the vast majority of people out there. </p>

<p>As a case in point, to extend your analogy, Bill Gates famously dropped out of Harvard. Yet look at all the top management at Microsoft. All of them (with the exception of Gates himself) are college graduates, mostly from the best schools in the world. Furthermore, Microsoft recruits graduates from the best schools in the world, but doesn't go around recruiting dropouts. Bill Gates, the most famous dropout in the world, doesn't say "Well, since I dropped out and was successful, that means I should fill my entire company with dropouts". Why is Microsoft actively recruiting people from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc. but not actively recruiting college dropouts? </p>

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Wouldn't it make sense that the "good" person can be even better if given the best facilities, professors, and the rest?

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<p>Like I said, what ultimately matters is the final product. The Yankees can spend more money than there is tea in China on payroll, but at the end of the day, they either won the World Series, or they didn't. </p>

<p>You also have to factor in the power of 'network effects'. The truth is, much of your education is not obtained from the facilities or profs. Much of it is obtained from your fellow students, in an informal setting. Maybe 20% of your waking time is actually spent in class, in lab, and in a formal educational setting. Most of your time is actually spent hanging out with other students. That is where I think a lot of the REAL learning takes place, through those midnight rap sessions and discourses over dinner, all the social networking, all that stuff. </p>

<p>That's where network effects come in. The better the other students that are there, the most that you will learn. Conversely, you can have great facilities, but if the other students are weak, then you will learn less. But of course that means that a school that has good facilities has to convince good students to come. And all the good students will be afraid (and rightfully so) that no other good students will come, which will hurt their networking. </p>

<p>But look, I agree with you that obviously having better facilities and better profs and all that stuff helps. Stanford, which started life as quite weak, became elite in part because they got the money to spend lavishly on resources. Harvard vastly developed its research infrastructure such that it is almost unrecognizable compared to what it was 100 years ago. MIT, Princeton, Yale, Caltech, Berkeley - each of these schools built themselves into giant research centers in their own right. </p>

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So you're saying we shouldn't rely on our own judgment but on the laziness of employers. Not all employers are like this. It may be true in the corporate world, but starting your own company is your ability alone. Your salary is not the brand name school, it is you

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<p>Very very funny you would mention that, because what you have said has actually been proposed as a way to break the information logjam. Basically, everybody knows himself the best. There is no asymmetric information when you're talking about yourself. Therefore if you don't feel you are being well served by the general market because of imperfect information, then one way to solve that is go to into business for yourself. </p>

<p>However, the fact is, most people don't do that, either because they are risk averse or because they know how good they are and so they know that they aren't cut out for running their own show. Hence, they have to play the information game of branding and signalling.</p>

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I'm sure everyone knows about the tests Google gives to applicants. A brand name school will probably get you far, but can you get in as high as you can be? Can you get hired by a company that actually rates in applicants by a standardized test? You can bank on it, I'll pass.

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<p>Funny you would mention Google because it reminds me of a snippet in an article about them I read in Fortune magazine that I reproduce here.</p>

<p>"For the most part, it takes a degree from an Ivy League school, or MIT, Stanford, CalTech, or Carnegie Mellon—America's top engineering schools—even to get invited to interview [at Google]. "</p>

<p><a href="http://www.fortune.com/fortune/subs/article/0,15114,548765-2,00.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.fortune.com/fortune/subs/article/0,15114,548765-2,00.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Sakky,</p>

<p>It's not unheard of, but let's put it this way: Not too many people are going to switch from Kennedy School of Government to a Physics PhD track in the near future. LOTS of people will switch to and from majors as divergent as those graduate degrees.</p>

<p>That's why I think that more attention should be paid to department quality for grad school than overall school name. Particularly in niche markets (I consider academia a niche market, to be sure.)</p>

<p>No doubt that my subpoint is less applicable to graduate school. And I also agree that general, as opposed to niche, brand-names become less applicable when you're talking about academia. </p>

<p>However, as I'm sure you'd agree, in academia, niche brand-names, if anything, actually become even MORE important. If any field really cares about where you got your degree from, it's academia, at least when you're talking about trying to get your first tenure-track job. Put another way, a guy who gets an engineering degree from a no-name school will probably still get an engineering job. It probably won't be at Google, but he should be able to get an engineering job. However, if you get your doctorate from a no-name program, you may have great difficulty in getting a tenure-track job. </p>

<p>So really, it's the same thing. Brand names matter. The only difference is what kind of brand name. But at the end of the day, it's the same idea. At the end of the day, whether you like it or not, prospective employers will judge you by the school that you came from.</p>

<p>Prospective employers do judge you in part by your "school" brand, particularly when you're a fresh graduate, and they don't much else else to go on. Eventually, there are other "brands" on your resume that have a significant impact on how prospective employers judge you, and that eventually supersede to a significant degree your academic "branding": where you've worked before, your previous job titles, the length of your tenure. </p>

<p>Businesses like to publicize their contractual relationships with bigger, better-known businesses. That's one way they build up their brand's good will. Career development can likewise be viewed as a process of building up your own brand; that's sort of implied in the concept of "making a name for yourself."</p>

<p>In the academic world, I've read that chosing a thesis advisor is an important part of making a name for yourself.</p>

<p>"In the academic world, I've read that chosing a thesis advisor is an important part of making a name for yourself."</p>

<p>Hmmm...</p>

<p>In the end, I agree 100% that name-brand matters. However, name brand is far more fluid than most of the hyperworried kids on these boards realize. For example:</p>

<p>I bet that my UCLA degree is better recognized on the West Coast than say... Brown. Not of course with people "in the know", but just the guy off the street. Y'know, your average dude.</p>

<p>In New York, probably not the same.</p>

<p>Academia is a field where HYPS and M don't always add up to "best department." I mean, Princeton has a good poli sci department, but UCSD will take them anyday in comparative politics and methodology. And if you have the strange desire to be a methodologist, I think that you should go to UCSD. But that's just my opinion.</p>

<p>"However, the fact is, most people don't do that, either because they are risk averse or because they know how good they are and so they know that they aren't cut out for running their own show. Hence, they have to play the information game of branding and signalling."</p>

<p>If they aren't "cut out for running their own show," isn't this a bad thing? Sakky all your posts are descriptive, and not really telling us much more info. No one here is arguing that most people don't play the information game of branding. I mentioned working for yourself and Google because they are exceptions. I argue "this is what I think and why" and you retort "well this is how it is.. let me explain more how it is.. in conclusion, this is how it is." So what? Your tacit opinion is approval, but can you comment on why this is the way it <em>should</em> be? If it should be, say so. If not, what would you prefer?</p>

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I mentioned working for yourself and Google because they are exceptions.

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<p>I don't think Google is an exception. Google is actually one of the most academically elitist companies in the world. </p>

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Your tacit opinion is approval, but can you comment on why this is the way it <em>should</em> be? If it should be, say so. If not, what would you prefer?

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<p>I actually think that this is the way it should be because it produces the most economically efficient result given the methods that exist today. I happen to like economic efficiency. </p>

<p>After all, like I said, university brand names serve as information substitutes for the purposes of hiring. So let's imagine a world where this was not the case. In such a world, it would be more difficult for companies to determine who to hire, especially for new graduates. So let's say that a bunch of new college grads apply for jobs, some coming from Harvard, some coming from no-name schools, and the companies are not allowed to use the school's name brand as a differentiator. Companies would then have to spend more time in the information-gathering stage, conducting very careful interviews, doing extensive background checks, and basically running a more extensive hiring process. This takes a lot of resources. </p>

<p>Furthermore, a lot of companies would respond by simply instituting longer 'training' periods for these new college grads. So the Harvard guy who should be making 50k to start instead ends up making the same 30-35k that normal college grads do. That's not economically efficient as the Harvard guy probably should have been getting paid more in the beginning, as he is probably more efficient.</p>

<p>And far and away the worst result (and the most likely) is that many companies would simply choose not to participate in the market for new grads at all. They would basically say "Ok, since I now have such great difficulty in which new graduate to hire because I don't have enough information to make that decision, I will simply choose not to hire any of them, and instead only poach experienced and proven people. Let some other company run the risk of hiring new graduates that can't be differentiated." Hence, what that would mean is that the number of total jobs available for new graduates would decline, increasing the unemployment rate of new college grads and lowering their average starting salary. </p>

<p>This is an example of a market failure. It's a market failure because efficient transactions are possible (because some companies out there would like to hire a Harvard grad, and the Harvard grad would like to work for those companies), but the transactions do not happen because of insufficient information in the market. </p>

<p>The point is that brand names serve as information signals. They are imperfect signals but they are still better than no signals at all. By removing that signal, you are just increasing the asymmetry of information in labor markets, which increases the number of market failures. A flawed economic transaction is still better than no economic transaction at all.</p>

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Sakky - any more books/articles you would recommend reading?

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<p>Anything by Thomas Sowell, but for the purposes of this discussion, "Knowledge and Decisions". It's a complete discussion of how rational decision-making is performed within the spheres of economics, politics, and sociology in the context of imperfect information.</p>

<p>You are comparing brand names on one hand to essentially nothing on the other. The alternative does not have to be information gather done by the companies who are hiring graduates. In addition, who is to say it is economically the most efficient? It is certainly financially the most efficient on the part of the companies, but thats not what economically means in the context we are using it. If you have better educated graduates who can produce better work, is that not economically more efficient? Rankings by the media, while obviously less than perfect, do not cost companies anything. If there is a demand for this by the public, then organizations will respond. What if wikipedia decided to join the effort? </p>

<p>"They are imperfect signals but they are still better than no signals at all."</p>

<p>Agree. Doesn't prove this brand-name is the best. It is not because it comes about through marketing which tries to influence the public that a certain school is good. Thus it makes you ashamed like aries said if you went to a no-name university even if it has a good program. That is the evil of it. Brand-names finally perpetuate wrong information and we as a free capitalist society should always be in the habit of obtaining better and more accurate information for our own use.</p>

<p>Not really relevant...but, Aries did not go to a no-name school --just not HYPS. I would let her tell you that, but she's probably studying for finals now :D</p>

<p>One more thing. Brand naming is based on the reaction of others. There is little if any information involved. Think about how you think of a university that in actuality you know little about. It is essentially a bunch of personal reactions from others. Slowly you hear things that are perceptions of a school, and because they are from people you think are credible, you adopt them. And finally you yourself are sharing these brand-name perceptions with others and over time they are in a small but real part influenced by your input. Your contribution to them worked in much the same way that your contributors worked to you.</p>

<p>People who are not involved in education, or who are uneducated, still receive these brand name ideas of college simply by communication with others and the media. There is no way to clear up issues using this approach. What do you turn to? What if you have a question? It is not even a body of information. It is not researchable. The marketing which supports this is biased toward individual schools. Because one school has more money than another it can market more. All these factors do not agree with any sort of ideal for education and are at odds with what colleges really try to do: provide the best training for students so that they can contribute the best they can toward the work force.</p>

<p>sreis, what's your major --Marxist theory? :D</p>

<p>Marxist? Why would you guess that? I'm not like offended or anything, I just assumed I was coming off as the conservative I am. </p>

<p>I think I do have something to say to end all discussion which is mostly a lot of words. If you want either to be accepted by society according to its current standards, or if at some dinner party you would be ashamed of your college which you know to be strong in your area, or if you want money, or if you want to be hired by a top company, or any combination of the above, you should really only consider a brand-name type school. If you truly want to be educated and do not care about these brand names as they can change in time even though your <em>real</em> experience at college will not, then you need to research as best you can to determine the best school for you. In some cases it will be the brand name school and in some cases not, with the brand name school being more likely the case.</p>

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Marxist? Why would you guess that? I'm not like offended or anything, I just assumed I was coming off as the conservative I am.

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<p>I did not see any Marxist undertones.</p>

<p>I am glad you can lend your expertise on the subject (although sreis was not addressing you.) Nevertheless, thanks for the input.</p>

<p>Mind to share your understanding of Marxist theory, nspeds?</p>

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I am glad you can lend your expertise on the subject

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<p>Sorry, I did not know we were on a private messaging forum.</p>

<p>Less facetiously, I was just expressing an opinion, no matter how worthless it may be.</p>

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Mind to share your understanding of Marxist theory, nspeds?

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<p>I am hardly an expert, but from my scant understanding of Marxism, I did not find hints of it in sreis's posts.</p>

<p>(slightly off topic... responding to a page 7 post)</p>

<p>For DRab,</p>

<p>Communication Studies at UCLA is competitive to get into, and Global Studies is actually one of the more demanding majors offered. very few athletes take these majors, if any. Seems like most are in Sociology, with some in History and some even trying to get into the competitive Business Economics major. (haven't seen a single person do the individual field major). sociology may be the creampuff of the "real" majors, but it's still a normal major with regular students in it. on the other hand, i'm wondering about "legal studies" and "peace and conflict studies" at berkeley. </p>

<p>and actually, stanford DID recruit reggie bush and gave him an offer. UCLA and berkeley didn't though (scroll to bottom):
<a href="http://scout.scout.com/a.z?s=15&p=8&c=1&nid=222247%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://scout.scout.com/a.z?s=15&p=8&c=1&nid=222247&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>According to the TV broadcast of the Stanford-USC game this year, Bush wanted to go to Stanford, but didn't get in.</p>