How much does going to an ivy matter?

<p>FWIW, before looking at "presidential production" nonsense, realize that many of the schools in the Ivy League, especially Brown and Dartmouth, did not become nationally recognized universities until the middle of the 20th century. Before that point they were largely regional schools who fed from local private schools and wealthy elites who lived in the area. So the question of presidential production with these schools is more like, "How many presidents has RI, Southern Mass, or Eastern CT produced?", or in the case of Dartmouth, "How many presidents has NH produced?"</p>

<p>Of course, this whole notion of presidential production is ridiculous and hilarious, but oh well.</p>

<p>Btw, PA is nonsense and there's no such thing as PA "eliminating graduate school". Most faculty members, rightfully so, only really know about their discipline and the quality of scholarly production in their discipline and therefore could not possibly divorce scholarly production in their discipline (and subsequently, graduate school-type issues) from their perception of a school at large. It's just that simple. Plus, there are schools that administrators love to hate just the same as there is a culture of schools that prospective students and CC people love to hate. PA is far from objective, far from truly undergraduate focused, and while useful in a wistful, romantic sense in a perfect world, is not super useful in reality, IMO.</p>

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realize that many of the schools in the Ivy League, especially Brown and Dartmouth, did not become nationally recognized universities until the middle of the 20th century.

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</p>

<p>And where did you get this factoid from?</p>

<p>Dartmouth has been "nationally recognized" as a COLLEGE--not a university--for over two hundred years. Dartmouth really isn't a "national university" because Dartmouth isn't really a university: it is an undergraduate college with several professional schools.</p>

<p>^ As the third oldest college in New England (after you-know-who) and the seventh oldest in the nation, Brown has also been "nationally recognized" for 235 years. It's produced 14 governors of states from Maine to Texas, as well as 8 U.S. senators and 1 Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. But to odate, no presidents.</p>

<p>For the record, I also think the presidential count is silly. But I'm not the one who brought it up; I was just responding to a rather extreme claim that the Ivies (and by implication ALL Ivies) dominate national politics at both the presidential and congressional levels.</p>

<p>As a Brown student and sometime intimately familiar with university history in the US, I'm saying something quite different than what Consolation and bclintonk think.</p>

<p>Neither Brown nor Dartmouth nor many other schools in this country, drew their student body from a diversified pool of nationwide applicants until fairly recently. While "nationally recognized" in the official sense, students often went to colleges and universities near where they lived. The potential pool of top students for all of these schools used to be smaller because it was quite rare for someone from say, Virginia to go to Dartmouth or Brown relative to someone from NE. And if you retort that's still true today, you'd be partially correct, however, the difference used to be way wider than it is right now.</p>

<p>The percentage of students at Brown who were from the lower New England industrial centers was astronomical earlier in the 20th century, and similar things can be said about Dartmouth, Penn, and just about any other school in that time period. Few schools were actually drawing applicants in high numbers from all over the country, especially at the smaller, LAC/university-college style schools.</p>

<p>if you want to become an investment banker...then it's practically a requirement to attend a top school (of course there are those with no degree who have the raw talent to make it big in banking or business).</p>

<p>for a lot of other careers: medicine and law, for example, you really need to go to graduate school, and so where you go for that is much more important than an ivy undergrad education.</p>

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<p>OK, I'll concede the point. But so what? As you yourself acknowledge, this was pretty much true of all colleges at the time. But Presidents of the United States have to come from somewhere. </p>

<p>Of the five Presidents who held undergraduate degrees from Harvard, none came from west of the Hudson River---a pretty narrow regional base. Of the three with undergrad degrees from Yale, two were from Connecticut and the third, William Howard Taft, came from Ohio but was a Yale "legacy" whose father co-founded Skull and Bones, and both of whose parents were native New Englanders. (Or if you want to say G.W. Bush was from Texas, then one from Connecticut and two "legacies"). The four William & Mary grads were all Virginians. And on down the line. There are a couple of outliers: Princeton's two alumni who served as President both hailed from Virginia, part of a long-time Princeton-South connection. Garfield, an Ohioan, went to Williams. And the service academies are clearly an exception, drawing from a national base. But the general pattern is it's almost all regional up until the recent run of Bill Clinton, an Arkansan who graduated from Georgetown; G.W. Bush, a Texan (of sorts) who entered Yale as a legacy; and Obama, a Hawaiian who after a brief stop at Occidental graduated from Columbia. Look, I agree this whole game is silly (but fun). But Brown doesn't get special dispensation because it was drawing from a "regional" base. So were all the other schools. </p>

<p>President/(state of residence)/alma mater:</p>

<p>Washington (Virginia) William & Mary (surveyor's certificate)
J. Adams (Massachusetts) Harvard
Jefferson (Virginia) William & Mary
Madison (Virginia) Princeton (then the College of New Jersey)
J.Q. Adams (Massachusetts) Harvard
Jackson (Tennessee) none
Van Buren (New York) none
W.H. Harrison (Ohio) none
Tyler (Virginia) William & Mary
Polk (North Carolina/Tennessee) UNC Chapel Hill
Taylor (Kentucky) none
Fillmore (New York) none
Pierce (New Hampshire) Bowdoin
Buchanan (Pennsylvania) Dickinson
Lincoln (Illinois) none
A. Johnson (Tennessee) none
Grant (Ohio/Illinois) U.S. Military Academy
Hayes (Ohio) Kenyon
Garfield (Ohio) Williams
Arthur (New York) Union College (NY)
Cleveland (New Jersey/New York) none
B. Harrison (Ohio/Indiana) Miami U. (OH)
McKinley (Ohio) Allegheny
T. Roosevelt (New York) Harvard
Taft (Ohio) Yale
Wilson (Virginia/South Carolina) Princeton
Harding (Ohio) Ohio Central
Coolidge (Vermont/Massachusetts) Amherst
Hoover (Iowa/Oregon) Stanford
F.D. Roosevelt (New York) Harvard
Truman (Missouri) none
Eisenhower (Texas/Kansas) U.S. Military Academy
Kennedy (Massachusetts/New York) Harvard
L.B. Johnson (Texas) Texas State-San Marcos
Nixon (California) Whittier
Ford (Michigan) Michigan
Carter (Georgia) U.S. Naval Academy
Reagan (Illinois/California) Eureka College (IL)
G.H.W. Bush (Connecticut) Yale
Clinton (Arkansas) Georgetown
G.W. Bush (Connecticut/Texas) Yale
Obama (Hawaii/Illinois) Columbia</p>

<p>bclinton-- still slightly missing the point.</p>

<p>Precisely because of those correlations I'm suggesting the schools had little to do with this-- many of these presidents went to top schools or whatever available school existed that was in their area or that they had a family history/connection to.</p>

<p>The fact that few went to certain schools and the fact that there is a large variety of schools on the list leads to the conclusion that geography mattered more than any other factor for the majority of people attending college pre-mid 20th century so this whole metric is bogus.</p>

<p>It's not that Brown should get special dispensation, it's that most top schools should because they were not the filters some contend they are today, pulling in top students nationwide.</p>

<p>In fact, since Obama is the only president to go to college really in this period of time just after the switch to a more national pool of applicants (really in the midst of it), it would seem that he may be the exception that proves the rule-- now that top colleges are filtering from a national list of top students its quite possible we'll see more production of presidents from traditionally recognized top schools. I'm not really sure. I think it's probably all bunk anyway, but that's an interesting twist.</p>

<p>I think your list actually proves what I am saying-- that more schools got top students in the past because of geography being a far more important factor than it is today and so historical looks at prominent graduates from these so-called top schools almost exclusively is accounted for by connections made prior to be there or while there as opposed to merit since many top students didn't even want or imagine access to schools hundreds of miles away.</p>

<p>bclintonk,</p>

<p>i'm not sure what the point of your list is (I fully agree that the exercise overall is rather silly).</p>

<p>having said that, if there is ANY pattern to be derived from the above list, surely its that the Ivy League (HYPC if you want to call it that -- though again you are missing UPenn from W.Harrison -- i digress) -- its that Ivy graduates punch above their weight.</p>

<p>Consider these simple statistics:</p>

<ul>
<li>Out of 43 Presidents, 11 have graduated with an undergrad degree from an Ivy (25%)</li>
<li>Out of those Presidents that graduated with any kind of higher degree at all (34), 11 have graduated with an Ivy undergrad degree (32%)</li>
<li>If you include graduate schools, 14 former and current Presidents graduated with an Ivy degree of some sort (15 if you include W. Harrison who attended UPenn but withdrew when his father passed) </li>
<li>So 14 out of 34 Presidents that graduated with some form of higher degree did so at an Ivy institution = a whopping 41% -- that's a pretty impressive number no matter how you want to spin it. Period.</li>
</ul>

<p>Now clearly, this doesn't mean you HAVE to go to an Ivy school to become President (of course you don't) -- but, history has proven, it can't HURT you to go to an Ivy. And not all Ivy graduates go on to become world leaders -- of course not, but that is not what people are saying.</p>

<p>Let's take a step back here and think about what the OP asked "Does going to an Ivy matter"? There are a lot of ways to answer that question depending on what "matters" to the person asking the question. If you take a look at the educational background of current and former Presidents (I'm not sure how we got started on that topic, but be that as it may) -- I think its pretty clear that Ivy schools are overrepresented. Make of that what you will (call it historical dominance, call it elitism, call it cronyism, call it regionalism, etc., etc.) -- call it what you want. It doesn't change the fact that 41% of current and former Presidents that attained a higher degree did so at an Ivy League institution. I think the numbers speak for themselves.</p>

<p>Alumni connections, getting entry level jobs, etc... Ivies aren't the only schools that can do that though.</p>

<p>History has proven, if you want to be a president, don't go to Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell and Upenn.</p>

<p>History has proven, if you want to be a Nobel laureate, don't go to Drown (only one), Dartmouth (0) and Upenn (only 2 undergraduates). </p>

<p>Yes, Harvard, Yale matters, but not every ivy.</p>

<p>I dont think that looking at presidents is a way of judging anything. Getting into Harvard 50-100 years ago isn't anything like it is today.</p>

<p>I think that one thing is clear though.....if you had rich folks back in the day you could get into Harvard without even having touch a book in your life. haha. things have definitely changed in this day and age. and i know people are going to still argue that harvard is harvard and whatnot but harvard today is a very different harvard than it was a century ago. there is no denying it. </p>

<p>im just pretty pumped that one president went to Bowdoin...haha</p>

<p>if you guys look at the famous alumni from most of the top schools in the US, it becomes pretty clear that the smart people and the people who are good at things emerge from the woodwork to do amazing things. a person is no defined by the school they attended.</p>

<p>great people will do great thing regardless of their alma matter!!!!!!!!</p>

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Yes, Harvard, Yale matters, but not every ivy.

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<p>Uh, by the "President" measuring stick (one that I am not endorsing, but merely debating) -- it's not "just Harvard and Yale". You are either choosing to ignore the facts or merely being selective for your own purposes, either way it's intellectually dishonest.</p>

<p>Current and former Presidents have either attended or graduated from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, UPenn. That's 5 out of 8 Ivies.</p>

<p>History has proven, there are many top schools (like Chicago, Amherst, Wisconsin, Berkeley, Swarthmore, US army, Georgetown, etc..) can do equal or better job than half of the ivies.</p>

<p>If Ivy matters, so many other schools.</p>

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As a Brown student and sometime intimately familiar with university history in the US, I'm saying something quite different than what Consolation and bclintonk think.

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<p>You seem to want to equate "national recognition" with "drawing students from other regions." I'd suggest that they aren't the same thing.</p>

<p>In addition, you are taking far too short a perspective. There was a time when the nation did not include the states west of the Mississipi, and the oldest schools were "nationally recognized" then.</p>

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Precisely because of those correlations I'm suggesting the schools had little to do with this-- many of these presidents went to top schools or whatever available school existed that was in their area or that they had a family history/connection to.</p>

<p>The fact that few went to certain schools and the fact that there is a large variety of schools on the list leads to the conclusion that geography mattered more than any other factor for the majority of people attending college pre-mid 20th century so this whole metric is bogus.

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<p>With that I heartily agree. (My father went to a public HS in the Pacific Northwest filled with the children of immigrants, graduating at the beginning of WW2. He and the other top students went to schools such as Yale and Princeton--on scholarship--due to the influence of their principal. I realize that they were the exception rather than the rule. In those days, Yale was full of white shoe boys like GHWBush, and they took enormous number of students from certain prep schools.)</p>

<p>Science has done the world more good than politics or banking. Producing politicians and bankers isn't necessarily a good thing.</p>

<p>Collegehelp spoke out the truth!</p>

<p>Hey everyone,</p>

<p>I heard that if you don't go to an Ivy, your life is effectively over. Can anyone confirm?</p>

<p>Thanks!</p>

<p>


</p>

<p>Ah, yes. Now you come close to making my point for me. If there's any pattern to be discerned here, it's that almost all our Presidents went to college in their home regions. In the early days of the Republic---or better, going back to Colonial times, as that's when when most of the early Presidents went to college, if at all---that meant most of our college-educated Presidents went to one of the half-dozen or so colleges then in existence, all along the Eastern Seaboard. Thus 7 of our first 10 Presidents went to Harvard, Princeton, or William & Mary, with the latter actually the dominant one--not because it was a better school necessarily, but because Virginia was politically dominant and Virginians, like everyone else, went to college in their own backyard. (The other 3 of the first 10 didn't graduate from college at all, though I'll acknowledge the_Prestige's point that Willliam Henry Harrison was a Penn dropout----but that's no great distinction for Penn as Harrison also dropped out of Hampden-Sydney College). That pattern persisted as the nation grew. </p>

<p>But let me repeat: apart from Harvard and Yale, the Ivies' production of Presidents is really rather unremarkable. Much better to go to school in your home or a neighboring state, like 24 of the 34 Presidents who graduated from college. But if you DO go to an Ivy it will significantly boost your odds if you're a Founding Father and attend when there are only a half-dozen or so schools to choose from (3); a Harvard or Yale legacy (at least 4, possibly more); and/or the scion of a fabulously wealthy and powerful family (at least 7). In short, it's not clear your Ivy connections are doing all that much of the work.</p>

<p>
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But if you DO go to an Ivy it will significantly boost your odds if you're a Founding Father and attend when there are only a half-dozen or so schools to choose from (3); a Harvard or Yale legacy (at least 4, possibly more); and/or the scion of a fabulously wealthy and powerful family (at least 7). In short, it's not clear your Ivy connections are doing all that much of the work.

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</p>

<p>Unless, of course, your name is Barack Hussein Obama (or even Bill Clinton for that matter)</p>

<p>Let's review the above checklist for Obama:
1) Not a Founding Father
2) Not a legacy of Harvard / Columbia
3) Not from a fabulously wealthy, powerful or well connected family</p>

<p>He did, however, make the most of his opportunities / network and leveraged his resume which, of course, didn't hurt having Harvard and Columbia on it. Now, is that the ONLY reason he is sitting in the Oval Office? Of course not. Did it hurt him? Absolutely not.</p>

<p>There is a reason a guy with interracial parents and a self-described "funny sounding name" aspired to attend the best schools he could: 1) no one was going to hand him anything on a silver plate; 2) he had the smarts, ambition and resources to go toe-to-toe with the best of the best. Now you have to take a step back and ask yourself, what's wrong with that? Absolutely nothing.</p>

<p>Why the need to discount and invalidate a successful person who happens to have an Ivy League pedigree? Is it sour grapes? Is there an underlying inferiority complex at play here? What is the real issue here?</p>

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Obama (Hawaii/Illinois) Columbia

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since Obama is the only president to go to college really in this period of time just after the switch to a more national pool of applicants (really in the midst of it), it would seem that he may be the exception that proves the rule

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Obama is a transfer ... he started out for two years at Occidental.</p>