@turtle17: It depends on which elite public and which fancy private. UVa and Cornell (and Oxbridge, which I suppose are elite publics) are roughly the same size, for instance. UNC is a little bit bigger.
In any case, I don’t think you can generalize. It does depend on goals, the individual kid, different schools, majors, etc.
For instance, someone who qualifies for a full-tuition/full-ride at a public with honors college could try to get full-tuition scholarships at Tulane/Miami/etc.
Why is “it depends” so hard an answer to accept?
@turtle17 “The statement “When you are comparing Michigan or UVA to an Ivy, you are probably getting something similar” is highly dependent on individual circumstances. Even the most “elite” publics are 4x or so bigger than the fancy privates, and end up having a broader range of corresponding outcomes. There is no one size fits all solution.”
It may be driven by size, but I think it may have more to do with major.
Looking at the Economist College rankings and using median earnings 10 years after enrollment, Michigan and Virginia enrollees had Median earnings are $57,900, and $58,600, respectively. They are in 84th and 78th place for median earnings. That is below the lowest Ivy, Brown, at $59,700. I understand that the cost of living is lower in Michigan, but I don’t think that will explain all of it.
Michigan has strong programs in engineering and business and its top students are as good as the Ivies, but the median student is not doing nearly so well. That suggests to me that Michigan student incomes are great in a few high income majors (i.e., business, economics, engineering, premed), however, students in other majors are more numerous and do no fare very well. Perhaps is there is a group of “haves majors” and a group of “have not” majors at Michigan.
While we tend to talk about issues like Public vs. Private, the student’s choice of major plays a huge role, and so does the student’s access to high income majors if they want to change into one. Many publics have very impacted high income majors, and make it difficult to change into them. Private schools tend to offer better access to them.
Also, Ivies tend to nudge students away from low paying vocational majors by simply not offering them as an undergraduate major. How many Ivies offer an undergraduate PE major, an education major, a social work major, criminal justice major, or agriculture major? Not many. So it appears to me that one way Ivies improve their financial outcomes is by simply closing off options that are, on average, poor decisions from an income perspective.
“Why is “it depends” so hard an answer to accept?”
Ha ha. I think it’s validation. Of want we spent. Or what we didn’t spend. Whichever the case is. 
Good news is there aren’t test cases with kids. No matter how well a given choice may have worked out, there may have been another one you were considering that would have worked out better. And no matter how badly a given choice works out, all others on the table at the time may well have been worse. Do the best you can with what you know and have and move forward.
@Much2learn, that’s actually a pretty miniscule difference in median earnings between Brown and UMich/UVa considering that Brown is much more difficult to enter (and thus has their pick in terms of input quality). It’s also swamped by regional COA differentials.
If anything, that’s an argument for UMich/UVa as they do nearly as well as Brown with (on average) poorer inputs.
Anyway, yes, selective majors tend to be tougher to get in to at publics. Again, it depends on goals, the kid, fit, etc.
@saillakeerie Exactly. Unless a student attends both programs there is no way to know which one would be of more benefit .
And if you look at Payscale also, lots of schools are pretty close in salary outcomes, save the very top ones that are very STEM oriented , and/or in high cost of living areas. And all of these types of metrics can be flawed. It depends on who responds,location and cost of living, type of employment, etc. https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report
Examples:
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Yes, it is a small difference between Brown, Michigan ($57,900) and UVA ($58,600). However, They are really not competitive on average with Ivies, overall. For example, they are nowhere near Harvard’s median of $87,200 or Penn’s at $78,200.
I think that what most people don’t understand is that I suspect that for the high demand majors, the Ivy students tend do better than Michigan or Virginia, on average, but that the difference is modest. However, based on that data, I suspect most of difference is because Michigan and Virginia 1) have a lower percentage of students in high demand majors than the Ivies, 2) do not provide access to those majors for as high a percentage of students, and 3) that the income gap between their students and Ivy league students is more significant for students who are not in those high demand majors.
@Much2learn, again, you’re ignoring inputs.
If you don’t take that in to account, I’m not sure how you can draw the conclusion that you did.
@Much2learn I think what @PurpleTitan is trying to say is that once you control for the academic credentials of the entering student and their major, there isn’t a real difference in ROI. I kind of hate even making the point because it is one that has been debated ad nauseam on these boards.
@Much2learn Yes. That’s my understanding. An English or Poli Sci major from a more elite school will most likely make more money than his counterpart at a lesser ranked school. Perhaps it’s because of the kind of connections they make. A computer science or engineering major would probably do just as well going to either type of school.
You are correct that major generally has a much bigger effect on post-graduation job and career prospects than college does. However, there are some high paying exceptions like Wall Street and management consulting that are college-prestige conscious and much less major related.
@ucbalumnus, the Street is network-conscious.
MC prides itself on being meritocratic (it’s all about how you do in case interviews), though there’s a greater concentration of talent at top schools and kids at feeders will know how to prep and a better idea of what the standards are.
It’s hard to generalize about how trends at schools will affect an individual student without much more information than is commonly available. For instance, on the input side family wealth can undoubtedly have an impact on earnings, but the questions are how much of an impact and in what way doe the impact express itself? For instance, is a writer from Brown more likely than a writer at U Michigan to have family money? If so, what does that mean? Will the rich writer have the ability to earn next to nothing writing fiction because she has family money to support her while the middle class writer takes a 9-5 job earning a solid income because he does not? Or will that wealthy writer take a cushy job with the family business, raking in the dough and outstripping the earnings of her UM counterpart?
Right. You can’t really draw conclusions even based off of what history majors at two different schools end up making if the inputs are different (as they will be).
What you can do is judge quality and rigor. For humanities/social science, is there a lot of writing? Are there lots of small seminars? Lots of faculty interaction?
You don’t “need” to spend $250K just because your dream is IB (say) and you think you need to go to a feeder. There are kids in the City who did a University of London distance bachelor’s (led by the LSE) that costs less than $10K for the entire degree, did well enough to win a scholarship to an LSE masters program, and are now in IB or S&T.
It is worth noting that one of the things you get when you pay for an expensive private is less of the “impacted” major phenomena. Even when big state u has a well-known engineering school, and excellent pay and placement for its grads in that area, there are more hurdles along the way. Sometimes the hurdles are at admissions, sometimes in moving into desired majors after a year or two, and often getting courses and changing majors is challenging. There can be impacted majors at privates, but there are usually deal with them faster and more aggressively. Or as my spouse and I say, they spend all that money on something.
@turtle17: Heh. It’s not as if an expensive elite private has no hurdles. It’s just that there’s one big hurdle (at admissions).
And it’s not as if all majors are available to all students either at a private. Try to change your major to business at Penn or theatre at NU or CS at CMU if you didn’t come in admitted in to those majors.
In any case, it really depends on the school. Some admit in to a major. Some take in after 1-2 years. Again, you can’t generalize.
That’s both funny and accurate about the one big hurdle at admission. And agree there are specific hurdles at specific places. But they are more pervasive as big state universities.
^^Well, by that measure, half the schools at Cornell could be called, “impacted majors”. IOW, I don’t think it should come as a surprise that it is difficult to transfer between schools at a big university. Impacted majors are far less common at LACs. Film Studies at Wesleyan is the only one I can think of.