And…because they got in. 
.
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I am not sure many of the kids who go there think of these places as stressful.
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I’m not sure “stress” was the main point of the OP. I thought it was:
In other words (and to compare like-with-like) are career/life outcomes better over the long term for Ivy graduates vs for other high performing students who studied elsewhere?
Perhaps @nyotaimori can clarify.
Yes, that was my point. “Stress” was mentioned in the original post, which is what I was referring to:
“With many striving to get into Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Northwestern, Williams, Pomono what happens next and is the prestigious degree related stress worth it in the end.”
From our experience I think there are several benefits from going to a well regarded school.
- Quality of peers and their academic engagement; Collaborative atmosphere since peers are not fighting over limited opportunities
- Quality of faculty
- A small percentage of extreme right tailed opportunities that are not easily accessible from elsewhere
- Optionality to change your career path fairly late into your undergrad
- Legacy benefits for one’s kids
- Resources
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I agree with all the points you listed. But I thought the question was different - outcomes in the long run, not college experience or the benefits in the immediate aftermath.
Waiting for OP to clarify the main point of their post.
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This is hard to estimate because
- only university alumni offices have some reasonable data on who is doing what
- even then, who is to say who is a success and who is not relative to what they really “want” to do?
a) Some people may want to work only 30 hours a week.
b) Some people may only want to work in Idaho.
c) Some people may only want to work in service professions
So you need to assess success given what the person wanted to do with their
life. Even this “what you want to do” keeps changing through life.
The whole thing is a fraught exercise.
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Well, sure - we can always play around with the definition of success.
If I take one particular definition: success in the corporate world based on conventional measures, and I look at people 15+ years into their career who are senior leaders, I don’t see a strong correlation between their success and the college they attended.
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Depends on the industry. I am in Finance. I am sure there is some reasonable correlation in our industry between college pedigree and success. As I look around, people have gone to well known colleges.
My kid is going into the same industry. I hear that at his future work place, most people have gone to well known places for college.
Last summer at a tech internship, I was told that there were 300 kids from UCB, and 1 or 2 from Rutgers. So it is what it is.
I’d add #8 to @neela1 's list: social capital. It still impresses people at cocktail parties, and institutions and clubs. My spouse was an administrator at a boarding school and it 100% mattered where you wentvto college. And mattered late in your career too, not just first job. It mattered for all faculty and certainly for the Head Of School.
I went to a T3 law school and haven’t practiced in 30 years. People are still impressed.
Should all that matter – probably not! But, in the real world, it does. Or, better stated, it can.
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I am not OP, but I interpreted the reference to stress as to what many high schoolers (and younger) are feeling. The need to take 20k APs and dual enrollment classes while maintaining an UW 4.0 GPA while having leadership roles in multiple ECs, having awards beyond school recognitions, etc. The thought that one needs to go to a “good” college to be a success, and that for many students the only “good” colleges are Top X ones. So my sense from reading this was, is all this stress that kids are feeling in their youth worth the advantages that come from attending a prestigious/Top X school?
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Rutgers kids get internships just as UCB kids do. I’m guessing this particular tech internship was located in Silicon Valley, near UCB. If the internship was instead located in NJ or NYC, I expect you’d see a very different ratio of Rutgers to UCB kids. There are many factors that can influence who participates in an internship beyond prestige of school name.
It’s often a similar pattern for post graduate employment. Kids who choose to attend Rutgers are often native NJ kids, with friends and family in NJ, who would prefer to remain in NJ/NYC after graduating. Rutgers can provide a lot of unique benefits to kids who meet this description that may not be found in UCB or numerous other colleges, such as having a larger portion of employers that are located in NJ/NYC who recruit at the college or participate in career fairs.
One can often see this effect when reviewing which employers have an especially large number of Rutgers grads. For example, the most common employer among Rutgers CS grads is Amazon, which has divisions in both NJ and NYC, <15 miles away from Rutgers. Among persons with the job title “engineer” on LinkedIn who work at Amazon NJ area, the most represented colleges are as follows.
- Rutgers (more alumni than the rest of top 5 combined)
- Stephens
- NJIT
- NYU
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Which describes a very large range of professions, such as:
- Physicians and other health care workers.
- Lawyers.
- Investment bankers.
- Management consultants.
- Managers up to CEOs.
- Accountants.
- Teachers at all levels, from pre-school to college professors.
- Politicians and lobbyists.
- Most engineers.
- Computer scientists.
- Statisticians and actuaries.
- Social workers.
- Military personnel.
- Police officers.
- Fire fighters.
- Professional athletes.
- Professional musicians and actors.
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If it is the kind of school where students are focused on going on to highly selective / prestigious private colleges, it is no surprise that college pedigree matters a lot in that environment.
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Many of the items you listed are not especially connected to attending a “well regarded” college. For example, I don’t associate legacy benefits with the college being “well regarded” The list at Colleges that Consider Legacy Status suggests that the majority of the hundreds of listed colleges consider legacy status in admissions, not just “well regarded” ones. There are also plenty of well regarded colleges that do not consider legacy or apply little weight to it such as MIT, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, and Amherst (ended last year),
Similarly there are many colleges that make it easy to change majors besides just “well regarded” ones. And there are also plenty of “well regarded” colleges that have some limitations on changing majors.
i associate collaborative atmosphere more with problem sets, exams, and grades than with “fighting over limited opportunities.” Some colleges encourage students to do problem sets in groups, having group projects, and in some cases even group exams for some classes. Other colleges have fewer collaborative assignments, a larger portion grading on the curve or grading with limited number of A’s, fewer opportunities for taking classes P/F, etc. This includes some well regarded colleges. For example, Princeton has a higher endowment per student than any other US college, yet their post mortem grade deflation report includes statements from students like the following, which certainly does not sound like a collaborative atmosphere (I realize that things have changed since ending their grade deflation policy).
“Often even good friends of mine would refuse to explain simple concepts that I might have not understood in class for fear that I would do better than them. I have also heard from others about students actively sabotaging other student’s grades by giving them the wrong notes or telling them wrong information. Classes here often feel like shark tanks”
It’s also possible for resources and opportunities to be more plentiful at not super selective colleges, particularly for students would not stand out among peers at a more selective college, but would be more likely to stand out at a less selective college. It also depends what types of resources and opportunities the student is looking for, like the Rutgers NJ example above.
In short, it depends on the student. A particular “well regarded college” might be a great choice for one student and a terrible choice for another. This makes it difficult to make generalizations. Most parents on this forum can probably say that the college their child attended was a great choice with many unique benefits that positively influence their outcome, but it’s impossible to know whether there would be a similar or superior outcome had he/she attended a different college.
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Perhaps for many, it is a college “as good as” their parents’ college(s) – but even with academic and extracurricular achievements obviously greater than their parents’ achievements when they were in high school, the current high school students may find their parents’ college(s) to be more difficult to get into than their parents did when they were in high school.
I’ve never heard anything even remotely close to this.
I am not talking about changing majors. I am talking about keeping several very different career options viable until well through junior year at least.
Well regarded is a loose term I used. I am aware of who has legacy and who doesn’t.
Perhaps the writer of the previously quoted claim about cutthroat competition was a pre-med, or in a major like biology that has a lot of pre-meds in the classes.
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The quote was from Princeton’s post-mortem grade deflation report. The report relates to Princeton’s attempt to reduce grade inflation by limiting A’s to a max of 35% of students. The limited number of A grades contributed to a more competitive and less collaborative atmosphere, which is discussed in the report. It was probably worse in pre-med classes than most others. For example, a pre-med student wrote:
I had to drop being Pre-Med here because the grades I was getting in the sciences were too low. I was getting low grades not because I didn’t understand the material, but because the curve was getting messed up by kids who were very advanced in chemistry and taking Intro to Chem and getting 100’s on the exams. Now my parents have to help me pay for a post-bac program so that I can take the sciences elsewhere post-graduation because Princeton didn’t allow me to take the necessary next step to realizing my dream by giving me unfair grades in the sciences. My sister went to {a peer institution} and was pre-med there, and even though I have been consistently better than her grade wise growing up, she was able to receive A’s i all the science courses and attend {a top medical school}. I don’t even know if I have a shot at {that medical school} because of Princeton. Not because I’m not qualified or a good applicant, but because Princeton’s grading policy makes me look like a poor applicant compared to other students applying with incredibly high GPA’s.
However, this limited A policy has since been abandoned, with good reason. So the atmosphere is likely notably different today. My point is that this type of non-collaborative atmosphere can occur at well regarded colleges, just as it can at less well regarded colleges. How well regarded the college is, is not the primary driver.
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Which brings us back to Post #14.