Is it really true that it doesn't matter where you go for undergrad?

College Search & Selection
21

The other kids are likely jealous and are taunting you for being a nerd, telling you should be like them because they won’t suffer any consequences for slacking off, going to parties, and getting lousy GPAs, because they’ll go to community college and then end up where you are.
The reality: only 15% students manage to complete their AA requirements in 3 years. Among those, few make it to a 4-year college. That 4-year college is unlikely to be highly ranked AND they’ll get lousy financial aid since transfers get the short end of the stick when it comes to financial aid (and no scholarships). (The exception is California, where some community colleges have transfer rates as high as 50 or 60%, offering strong UC/CSU-preparatory programs even though they also offer a lot of remedial education. There are a few such programs but nowhere near as extensive, such as Virginia Piedmont to UVA, NYS CCs to Cornell AEM, GAPerimeter to GTech, and the percentages who manage to complete them are very low.) In addition to losing out on scholarships, they’ll have to pay for remedial education they could have received for free in high school but were too immature to take advantage of.
Going to a 4-year college - LAC, regionally-ranked private, public flagship, national research university- will be an entirely different experience from attending community college. And if you’re lower income but made it into a meet 100% need college*, or have high stats and win a scholarship, you’ll be paying much less than through the CCollege + transfer route.
CC can be a good choice, but if you’re a high-achieving student, there are better choices academically, financially, and for personal growth.

Another aspect to consider is peer quality: if you’re driven and academically focused, do you really want to be in a “discussion” where the only other person in the room who’s done the reading is the professor? where half the kids don’t even bother to show up for the final? Where everyone has big plans AND way to make them happen AND make them happen (vs. sit in their room playing videogams, or go home to their parents - perhaps not by choice but it would change the school’s atmosphere, wouldn’t it?) What you learn from your peers is just as important as what you learn in class.

Think about class size: some schools have classes capped at 18. Others have caps at 40. Others still have lectures with 300 students. Some will argue it doesn’t make a difference but… if you’ve ever had a class with 17 classmates and a class with 39 of them, you see how that’d be different - the professor can’t teach the same thing, not in the same way, can’t organize the same activities. You can take a class of 18 on a trip to a museum or to a movie, not a class of 300 (and for the class of 40, you’d make it optional, so that half the class wouldn’t go and thus wouldn’t be able to use the experience in class discussion.) Perhaps you’re better sitting in a large hall taking notes, so it wouldn’t matter to you, but to some students, it would.
Some CCs have smaller classes than the flagship, but since state budgets have cut all public education, CCs class sizes have mushroomed too. Compare your local CC, the flagship, and a good LAC. And what if you make it into the Honors program at your flagship - how many small classes do you get to take during your first semesters- 2/10? 6/10?
If you have good grades and get into your flagship’s honors program, you get perks: nice dorm, trips, scholarships, priority registration (never have an 8 am class ever again! pick the best professors! study whatever you want! keep a day free for an internship!)… it depends on the university so check. But it means your hard work is rewarded.
http://publicuniversityhonors.com/

This is getting long so I’m afraid you won’t read more, but, essentially, yes, there IS a difference between going to a community college and going to a good university. There are lots of them - as someone said above “tangible and intangible”.

Now, obviously, “good university” isn’t just Harvard. It can be UWisconsin Madison, Wellesley, Cal Poly SLO, Carleton, Dickinson, Davidson, UMichigan, Wooster, Hendrix, Whitman… There are LOTS of them. Go to your public library and borrow a “Fiske Guide”, “Insider’s Guide to the colleges”, or “Princeton Review’s best Colleges”. Start reading, place post it notes next to colleges you like, then try to see what they have in common.

Start a “college notebook” to keep your notes. Look for colleges accross the selectivity spectrum but focus, not on name, but on characteristics you like. Do include your state’s flagship and read up on its honors college (see above website), especially its application process and deadlines. In many cases you need to have completed testing in October or November for scholarships, with some deadlines in November and others in December.

Remember that you can “only” borrow $5,500 for your freshman year and that the #1 source of scholarship money is the university you apply to, so run Net Price Calculators on each university you like. Choose 4 with different results and bring them to your parents. Be ready for them to be in shock/fall off their chair. :slight_smile: Then have a discussion about how much they can pay, out of pocket, for your college education. If they can’t/won’t pay what the NPCs say they should, it means you need to have a “merit aid” strategy. If the 100% need schools offer the best price, it means you need to read up on each of the 60 or so schools on the list and run the NPC on each since even if they promise to meet 100% need they will not calculate it the same way (while of course keeping a few schools where you can win full tuition scholarships if you have the stats, plus your flagship’s honors college.)

22

In response to the post quoted below, while, as I said, it may be possible to go to community college and still go to Harvard for grad school, it’s extremely rare to do that–you probably have a better chance of being struck by lightning. Thus for all practical purposes, going to community college will shut doors for going to a top-tier grad school.

"It does happen sometimes. The following describe a student who started at a community college, transferred to a state university to complete a bachelor’s degree, and is now a PhD student at Harvard.

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/05/10/medalist2011/
http://www.dailycal.org/2011/05/25/benavidez/
http://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/aaron-benavidez "

23

There’s a lot of room between not going to Harvard and going to CC. Like, hundreds of decent 4-year universities. If you have the money and stats, go for Harvard. The worst that will happen is that you won’t get in, but I’m sure you can land yourself at a respectable 4-year university.

24

Yes and no.

Your classmates are partially right. Let’s say a hypothetical student goes to community college, transfers to his or her local public university, gets a good job after college and then ends up at Harvard’s business school. They will have the same opportunities and potential pay as someone who went to Brown and then HBS, or Harvard College and then HBS. For any career that requires graduate school, that’s partially true - where you went to undergrad doesn’t matter. It’s where you got your final degree that matters. I went to a well-respected but not top liberal arts college, and I got my PhD at Columbia. I was there with people who went to Harvard and Brown and Stanford for undergrad - and also people who went to San Francisco State and Arizona State and tiny liberal arts colleges and places I hadn’t heard of before. If your goal is graduate school, then you can do that anywhere.

I also wouldn’t count on the Ivy League name impressing employers. Employers do tons of hiring and they are usually thinking practically; only in certain fields is the Ivy League name a plus (like management consultant or investment banking). And then, that only matters for your first job - after that, it’s all about experience.

However…that doesn’t mean that where you go to undergrad doesn’t matter at all. It usually matters more indirectly. The connections your career office has are a big indirect factor - you can’t apply to jobs or enter fields you don’t know about; career offices at top schools usually have all kinds of perks and pluses that smaller or less-financially flush schools don’t have. Companies may recruit there that don’t recruit elsewhere. But like you said, it’s the other resources. It’s the study spaces and libraries that make it easier for you to get high-level work done; it’s the professors, who are often doing cutting-edge research OR are doing awesome things out in their communities or fields (like the CS professor at Columbia who has started a tech start-up initiative for Columbia alumni and NYC-area techies). Largely, it is your classmates, who will be amazing and accomplished young people, and terribly ambitious, and whose competitiveness will push you to achieve.

And it’s the experience, too. In my experience working with Columbia undergrads, they were an extraordinarily intelligent and talented group of young people who had done some things by 18 that I never even thought were possible (or knew existed) when I was in high school. If you go to Harvard, you will be in residential colleges with these people, living and learning and making friends. Some of them - many of them - will go onto become famously successful, connected, powerful. They may be the connection that helps you land jobs later. They can be the connection that helps your own children get internships, should you choose to have them.

So, I think that if you want to go to Harvard for real, then don’t let the naysayers discourage you. I would hope, though, that you want to go to Harvard because there’s something special about Harvard that you love. There are lots of places with great resources and prestige that may help you on the job market; but think about the experiences that you’ll have, too. Do you want to go to Harvard for itself? If so, don’t worry about what your friends and classmates say - they are trying to deal with their own feelings about college. They are trying to get a rise out of you, and the best thing you can do is not let them get to you. Either ignore them completely, or respond with flippant comments - “Don’t worry, I’m applying to the community college too!” or “Hey, somebody’s got to take on the crushing debt in this class!” (You probably WON’T have crushing debt - as Harvard has excellent financial aid - but the point is to make a self-deprecating comment that gets them to leave you alone, not tell the truth.)

Also, working hard is never a waste, even if you don’t get into a Harvard or another top school. Students who do well in high school tend to do well in college, and students who do well in college tend to do better in life. Working hard and staying about your business is never a bad choice.

25

The chances of being struck by lightning in your lifetime are about 1 in 3,000.

I would say that for the average community college student, this is probably true. But for this particular student and others like him/her - a motivated, ambitious student who did well in high school and has family support to move through - the idea of going from a community college to a four-year college and eventually making it to a top graduate school is not improbable or even rare.

The reasons the majority of students at community colleges don’t finish, much less go to top graduate schools, are the same reasons that most of them are at CCs in the first place - their families are poor; they don’t have the ability to attend a four-year college full-time because they have to work and commute from home; they are older and have family responsibilities to attend to; they didn’t do well in high school and now the only place they can get into is a community college; so on and so forth. These issues are what makes it difficult for people to move through community colleges into four-year schools, but they are also often the issues that resulted in them being in the CC in the first place. (That’s not even accounting for the fact that many - perhaps most - community college students never intended to get an AA or a BA anyway; they’re just there to take a few classes. However, they get lumped into the statistic.)

But if we are talking about an individual straight-A student (or close to it) who had the potential to get into Harvard from undergrad, who is not poor, and whose family and friends are supporting her? Chances are very, very good that she can finish at that community college and transfer to a four-year college. Chances are even pretty good that she can go to a top grad school, if she so desires. It is the circumstances and the ambition of the student that make the difference.

26

Julliet, point taken.

It’s thus much more likely to be struck by lightning than to go from a community college to Harvard for graduate school.

Having gone from a “lesser” undergrad school to Harvard for grad school, I can state that, from my personal experiences (and seeing admissions data), going to a highly-ranked school gives one a leg up in grad school admissions.

At a highly-ranked school, one is surrounded by students, faculty and staff who are all used to success with grad school admissions, and the peer pressure and institutional knowledge and support definitely help. Plus, at least law schools may give a “boost” to a GPA coming from a top-tier school. As per the thread about Rutgers and pharmacy degrees, Harvard Law School certainly does for students coming from Harvard College.

At a community college, you wouldn’t have any of those benefits. Figuring out how to get into Harvard or a similar school, without any shared knowledge, peer pressure or the like from others at your school, is much harder. Plus even if one does go from community college to Harvard, a community college on a resume would be a major black mark and would somewhat offset the Harvard name on the resume.

27

@HappyAlumnus‌
Not really arguing against your POV bc we have always lived near CCs which are less than stellar and full of students struggling with that level of content. I am not a huge CC fan. Unless for courses that are not relevant to career objectives, we have always had our children DE at universities for that reason.

That said, why would someone ever include their CCs name on a resume? You would list where you earned your bachelor’s degree. The only time I can imagine listing the CC would be on college applications where all previous institutions are required.

28

Admissions data is not good for this task, because a higher proportion of students from competitive schools doesn’t mean that you are more likely to be admitted from a competitive school. Students from top schools are more motivated to go to graduate school in the first place, so that’s a big factor in seeing more students from top schools. Most students who go to State Directional U just want to get a good job; many of them have not been exposed to careers that require graduate school, and many of them may be middle-class or lower without the resources.

The other thing is that, as @Mom2aphysicsgeek points out, you would not know whether your colleagues went to a community college. The website/admissions data would list from where they got their bachelor’s degree, and by default that would not be their CC. Thus, it may appear that 0% of your colleagues started at a CC when the proportion is higher.

I do agree on a philosophical level that going to a top college is probably the better choice if one can afford it, for a variety of reasons. I do even agree that attending a four-year college is probably a better option than attending a CC for a high-achieving student, and that students with the family resources should go to a four-year college if they can manage it. But that does not mean that an individual student going to a CC (particularly one who could’ve gotten into Harvard) has “better chances of being struck by lightning” than going to a top graduate school - I actually tend to believe that’s quite false.

Also, I know of no evidence that this

Is true. First of all, as the above post states, why would anybody put their community college on their resume? Second of all, going to a community college is not a major black mark. And third of all, even if an employer did somehow see the CC or know about it, I think most sensible adults would assume that someone who went to a CC first and then Harvard did well enough academically and in life to be successful at Harvard, and therefore their knowledge and skills are equivalent to any other Harvard grad’s. As someone with a PhD I couldn’t care less whether someone got their start at a community college - I am more interested in their skills and knowledge, and whether they can do what I need them to do.

29

Hi Julliet:

  1. Yes, having a community college on a resume would be a black mark. When I was in law school, a study came out showing what factors played roles in hiring. Law school grades were #1 most important, and undergrad school name was #2 most important. Having a community college on a resume- or even having it come up in the interview- would be a negative.
  2. Yes, going to a top school does help in grad school admissions. I speak not only from my own experience (going from a LAC that was certainly not Harvard) to Harvard, and comparing notes with those of my classmates who went to more prominent schools for undergrad. Plus, as shown in the thread about Rutgers and pharmacy degrees, at least one law school admissions committee-if not many-grants a boost to a GPA coming from at least one top school, compared to GPAs coming from other schools.

To summarize: if you want to go to a top grad school and get a top job, then while it is possible coming from a community college, it is very unlikely, and going to a community college will weigh against a student who tries to do so.

30

I would like to see the survey that shows how many students go from community college to the ivies.
If you are that far ahead of the avg. HS student, one would assume community college may be as boring as HS for a student that needs to be challenged.

31

@intparent Faint heart never won fair maiden. Swinging for the fences does not preclude (wisely) choosing schools that are mid-range, and safety.

32

@HappyAlumnus, when comparing notes with classmates, how did you disaggregate the effect due to the intrinsic qualities of an applicant (smarts, drive, discipline, whatever) from the effect due to attending a particular college for undergrad?

BTW, I don’t know when you went to HLS, but these days, admission to even HLS is driven almost solely by GPA and LSAT (http://harvard.lawschoolnumbers.com/stats/1415), so it really doesn’t matter where you went for undergrad.

These days, only YLS is small enough and selective enough that getting above their median LSAT and median GPA won’t guarantee you a spot (or at least get you on the waitlist).

33

Well, aren’t you the romantic one. Students who focus more on their reaches than their matches and safety selections are often left in a bad spot in the spring when they have no acceptances to schools they actually researched well and want to attend. And no one says a student shouldn’t have reaches, but a student who says “any Ivy” is their desire doesn’t know the maidens involved very well.

34

PurpleTitan, there are more “scattergrams” out there that have far more data than the one you post. Even getting well above HLS’s median GPA and LSAT score will at best increase the odds of getting in; a significant minority, if not more, people above those thresholds are waitlisted or rejected, which means that other factors are what moves one from a waitlist prospect to an admitted one. In addition, look elsewhere on this board; going to Harvard College results in a 0.2 GPA “boost”.

It most certainly matters where you go to undergrad–says me, who has been through the law school application process, studied at HLS and is still involved in alumni activities with recent grads and current students, and who has carefully analyzed admissions data.

35

@HappyAlumnus, look at previous years. You can believe what you like, but the data on that site corroborates with data that I’ve seen elsewhere regarding HLS admissions in current times. A minority may be waitlisted (and it doesn’t seem significant in recent years); almost no one who passes the thresholds is outright rejected.

36

PurpleTitan, I have looked at all years on the “scattergram” site that you post.

Even numbers at or above the HLS median numbers (about a 171 LSAT/3.8 GPA, more or less) result in only an increased likelihood of admission. To pretty much have a sure shot (which is not 100%) of being admitted, you have to have numbers far, far higher than the HLS threshold–meaning that unless you’re Albert Einstein, other factors will also be considered to separate the wheat from the chaff, and even if you’re Albert Einstein, your other factors will be considered and there is a slim chance that you’ll be rejected based on them.

GPA and LSAT scores certainly are far and away the most significant factors–but there are others that are considered, such as undergrad college, now work experience (as per Martha Minow herself), etc.

37

@HappyAlumnus, anyone who looks at those scatterplots can see that a fairly small move in GPA and LSAT increases your odds significantly to HLS. Unless you’re colorblind, you can see that you don’t need “far far” higher stats than threshold to see your chances jump well above 50% to HLS these days. Do you fail to see that nearly solid block of green on the upper-right-hand corner?

In the 2013-2014 cycle, it starts at 173 LSAT & 3.7 GPA.

Way more green than yellow & almost no red from 173 on right and 3.7 GPA and north.

Bump your LSAT up to 174 and you have good odds with a 3.6 GPA or up.

38

Re #28

Why would a CC be a negative point if the person got bachelors and law degrees from “good” (non CC) schools? Or is law that school elitist?

39

PurpleTitan- again, I can read the scattergrams. Please pay attention to my exact words; you clearly are not:

GPA and LSAT numbers are very important in law school admissions–and are the most important things. Even if you have numbers at or somewhat above the median numbers for a particular school, though, you aren’t guaranteed admission. You have to have numbers far above the school’s median numbers to have more or less a sure shot at being admitted, and even then, it’s not automatic. Other factors, ranging from work experience, your interview, your “story” and your undergrad school and major, also play a role.

Is that clear, PurpleTitan?

ucbalumnus, the law school is not “elitist” in terms of the effects of a non-prestigious school on a resume in hiring. Employers, however, only have limited data to go on when hiring someone, particularly if the person has little or no work history. Hiring someone who has 2 fancy schools on a resume is just a safer bet than hiring someone who has only 1 fancy school on a resume. Perhaps 1 school mistakenly let the person in, but if 2 let the person in, then that gives comfort to an employer.

40

So does CC matter between two situations?

A: CC, then BA/BS at X, then JD at Y
B: BA/BS at X, then JD at Y

I.e. does CC negatively affect A relative to B in law? (It does not in some other fields.)