Ivy League doesn't have monopoly on ed. opportunities

College Search & Selection
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<p>But you know what?</p>

<p>Ivy League schools are BETTER. </p>

<p>Yes, this would explain why some/many of them are out-ranked by non-Ivy peers according to various publications. Some are clearly only riding off of reputation and not the actual quality of the education to even achieve the ranks they have now. This goes for many private schools. You must be speaking for only top 10 Ivies, some of which are still out-ranked.</p>

<p>QwertyKey, good point. Midwest is solid. We in the south are getting there. Though from what my friend at Duke tells me, there isn’t a significant difference between the education at the two of us (even when it comes to difficulty. Seems like the top privates in the south are about the same here). Duke just probably has much better name-branding. Their facilities are awesome too.</p>

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<p>For the fun of it, y’all should take a look at this year’s Forbes Best Colleges list- LAC’s are intermingled with the top ivies; all lists should be taken with a grain of salt, however.</p>

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<p>I don’t understand why people use Ivy interchangeably with elite. Yes, all of the Ivy League schools are in the top 20, but they make up only about half of the top 20 schools. </p>

<p>Obviously there are other good schools like MIT and Stanford that aren’t in the Ivy League.</p>

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<p>Although I agree with sbrtth’s assessment about the scholars/workers divide between Ivies and other schools, it’s a limited explanation. I’d add this: the scholars that come out of Ivies are also workers, just on another scale. A lot of my peers go to Wall Street or international consulting jobs right out of school. A lot of them find connections because of the status of the university - and its alumni.</p>

<p>We go to work, too. We want decent salaries. We just expect to run the world - which, admittedly, isn’t always realistic.</p>

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<p>There are many great schools in this country. There are also many great students. But students all over the world would like to have Harvard on their resume. Or maybe Yale or Princeton. And by reputation, UPenn, Cornell, Brown and Dartmouth.</p>

<p>In other words, the IVY league is a status symbol. If you can get in, you are very smart. </p>

<p>This does not mean you are not smart if you do not go to an Ivy or equivalent.</p>

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<p>To attend an ivy league,one has to come from a certain background,where one has plenty of time&resources to attend summer camps,take piano lessons&hire SAT tutors.The ivy league is basically closed to extremely bright low class kids,who help their parents economically&manage to pull off perfect SAT scores.The ivy league prides itself on turning away perfect SAT scorers.It prefers just those extracurriculars that sm1 with the requisite leisure can develop.</p>

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<p>@villager</p>

<p>The short answer is that your accusation is almost total ********. Selective colleges are not ignorant of applicants’ circumstances, and do all they can to encourage first-generation and underprivileged college applicants to apply. They don’t always succeed, but the idea that selective schools are deliberately keeping these students out is absurd.</p>

<p>The long answer is that it’s very complex issue. There’s a definite correlation between income/parental education and standardized test performance/GPA. The students who are the most qualified academically to attend the most selective schools therefore tend to be those from comfortable socioeconomic classes; this is what the conservatives are getting at when they demand that universities make decisions based on “merit” instead of affirmative action. But academics isn’t everything, and schools look for the students who will bring the most to their school. This means that extracurriculars, personality, and other intangible factors matter a lot in a holistic admissions process. Your criticism that valuing extracurriculars highly privileges applicants with privilege is true, which is why it is no longer done the way it used to be. The applicants who write about their experiences “seeing the world” and pursuing other expensive extracurriculars no longer dazzle admissions officers; they’re usually rejected. Admissions officers strive to evaluate a candidate’s accomplishments in the context of the opportunities that they’ve been given, which evens the playing field a bit. Affirmative action policies specifically favor applicants who are underprivileged and/or whose parents have no higher education. This, too, is an attempt to ensure that selective schools will admit qualified applicants from lower socioeconomic classes. The student who comes from modest means, works to take care of their family and nonetheless does well academically will be admitted without hesitation, and rightly so. It’s a lot harder to maintain a 3.6 if you’re also working a ****ty part-time job. The problem isn’t so much that few qualified students from poor backgrounds are admitted, but that few apply in the first place, usually because they don’t have the college counselors who encourage and help them to apply to top schools and/or because they’re concerned they won’t be able to afford tuition at top schools. Of course, a good deal of poor students still apply and are rejected, because they’re not qualified. Since those with greater wealth tend to be more academically qualified than those with less, this is inherently unfair. On the other hand, you can’t lower standards just so that poorer students can be admitted. This tension results in the very complex and difficult balancing act that is a progressive, holistic admissions process.</p>

<p>It’s nowhere near perfect, or even just, and there are many ways that it could be improved. But you can’t accuse the schools of not trying!</p>

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<p>^pwoods…that could not have been said better.</p>

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<p>i joke when i hear my friends say they’re “ONLY applying to ivy league schools” and say that i’m only applying to SEC schools. we tend to forget the ivy league was just an athletic conference that grew some mighty big britches.</p>

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<p>There is a huge difference in difficulty and student qualities between the universities. Obviously there are exceptions, but at a “more selective” school the standards are simply lower than at a “most selective” school. This is coming from someone who’s gone to a community college, Worcester Polytechnic (ranked in the 60s on USNews, but probably underrated), and Johns Hopkins (ranked 13 on USNews). Each one was substantially more challenging than the previous school. </p>

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<p>Wrong. Johns Hopkins does not belong in that category - it gets more research funding than any other school in the country and definitely is aimed at scholars. It has more Nobel Prize winners than a lot of the Ivy League schools. I’d be willing to bet that more of its student go to grad school than most of the Ivys. Granted, I go to the school so I am not exactly unbiased, but it is really easy to demonstrate that Johns Hopkins is very scholastic. </p>

<p>Maryland and Lehigh also don’t belong in that category. They’re no more vocational than the weaker Ivys.</p>

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<p>I came across this study that has a graph showing the correlation between a school’s US News ranking and a college graduates salary.Favorite,“Yale graduates should really,really want to go to Harvard”.
<a href=“http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/STAR_slides.pdf[/url]”>http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/STAR_slides.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>The East? Why the East? The Midwest is best.</p>

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<p>I don’t think that regional bias alone explains for the mystique of the ivies…first of all, a lot of kids from all over the country and the world want to go to Ivy league schools, so it isn’t just provincial. That said, such schools exist all over the country, an obvious one with mystique is Stanford; there also are schools like Duke that have the high reputation as being a ‘top schools’, and folks from Texas will tell you that Harvard is the “Rice of the East Coast”, and so forth…</p>

<p>Are the ivies all they are cracked up to be? Yes and no. Because they have the mystique, they tend to draw from a large, large pool of applicants, and many of these are high performers, so instead of a handful of kids with perfect SATs, Intel science talent search awards, etc, they have a lot of them. The difference between an Ivy and a top notch school ‘not an ivy’ is that they may simply because of mystique not get as many “incredible level” applicants…</p>

<p>The other thing to keep in mind that colleges are not universally great or bad in all things. In Engineering for example there are plenty of engineering schools whose reputation and ratings are higher then the Ivies, and so forth. It also depends on the program within the a school as well, the faculty in a department makes a difference. </p>

<p>There is also the international factor at play here, too. The Ivies have an international brand, or at least some of them do. Talk to aspiring people in China or Korea, for example,and I guarantee they have heard of Harvard or Yale or Princeton (and yes, some other elite schools, like Stanford), whereas they might not have heard of a Rice University or a University of Chicago or Duke or whatever…which means the ivies often will get the best and brightest from those places as well, simply because they are known and respected…</p>

<p>So what are the benefits of an Ivy education? Well, for one thing, the schools tend to be good schools, great ones, whatever, and they do tend to draw a high level student body for the most part (but then again, so does MIT or CalTech), and one thing you can make there is contact with connected people, because of the scions of business and industry going there (legacy or not doesn’t matter; those who never went to harvard or Yale or Princeton but made their fortune often want their kids to go there…). </p>

<p>The real advantage quite frankly is that many people, from all over, know of the ivy league schools and have a high opinion of the brand, justified or not, and it can make a big difference depending on what you are going to do. At the very least, it can be a positive factor when interviewing for jobs, many people on the other side of the interview desk will see Harvard or Yale or Princeton or whatever on their resume, and put them in the perspective pile (which is true of other high level schools, of course, depending on what you are talking about. A tech company seeing a kid with a degree from MIT in EE will put them on the perspective pile a lot easier then a kid from Purdue, no matter how good Purdue is (and it is, as an engineering school). </p>

<p>If you are talking about investment banking, then coming from an Ivy program or maybe a handful of other schools is still considered a minimum price of admissions (more graduate degree then UG, but still true). This is especially true at the big banks, where Investment Bankers are still seen as ‘gentleman’ and such (I’ll leave you to guess what I think about that one), so if you are thinking of going that way, and ivy school might be a requisite.</p>

<p>What do I think? As a hiring manager and someone who has been out there a long time, the ivy education is a good one, and the experience is unique in some ways (as all schools are), but unless you are heading into something like investment banking or other places where it still does matter, or if you have a really spectacular scholarship and aren’t going to be forking out 200k, much of it on loans, then I would say it isn’t necessarily worth it. For whatever push it may give you at the start of your career, where you went to school stops mattering once you are out there and making your way, for the most party (with some exceptions, now dying out, where there was once the equivalent of legacy preference in the business world), and like grades it really will stop mattering a whole lot. I would put the effort into finding a school that is a fit, where there is good faculty and a good environment to learn a bit about life and how things work, where you will be challenged, and then work hard after school on working your way up the ladder or whatever. </p>

<p>I also will add an observation I have seen commonly with kids graduating from programs they think are elite, it is possible to come out believing somehow that going to an elite school makes someone superior, and if you can avoid getting that, it will be to your advantage. I have seen kids from these programs flame out because of that attitude, which doesn’t sit well especially if you are working with talented people who may have gone to a good state school and done great, and shown themselves professionally, and having some snot nosed kid acting like they are inferior…as someone once said, sometimes it is better to hire avis then hertz, because avis knows they are #2 and tries harder:) (No, not all ivy graduates are like that, or even a large percentage, but it is still out there IME).</p>

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<p>good points. but i think that a lot of the students who are qualified to go into ivies really don’t fall for the mystique as much as the average idiot who ranks universities according to how many mentions they get in hollywood movies in the form of “Tony Stark is a genius b/c he graduated from MIT, blah, blah, blah”. I think that people who care so much about higher education to attain the marks necessary to get into ivy league schools are also probably willing to consider the issue of where they should attend a college much more carefully than students who didn’t work so hard to make such marks. and those smart and hard-working students will probably find ivies less alluring as they do more research and find that the subject of college rankings is a complex issue and probably will realize that the strength of the specific academic program to which they’re applying (which is the real impact factor for post-graduate job prospects) is a lot more important than picking a school based on overall prestige (i.e. how big a hard-on saying going to x school will give the average idiot layperson when you meet them). furthermore, they will find that ivies are among the best but rarely if ever is an ivy the absolute best in any one program.</p>

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<p>Actually, it seems as if your logical premises to the exact opposite conclusion: it is precisely those smart/hard-working students who are able to be admitted to the Ivies who are likely to perform sufficient background research to realize that the specific academic program is actually less important than many people seem to think it is and it is the overall school prestige that is often times more important. </p>

<p>The key logical twist towards understanding why that is the case is that the vast majority of people do not end up taking jobs in their field of study. Let’s face it: most poli-sci majors do not become professional political scientists, most sociology majors do not become professional sociologists, most math majors do not become professional mathematicians. This holds even at the top schools - and perhaps especially so. For example, the overwhelming majority of students at MIT are engineering or science majors, yet before the economic crash, nearly half of all MIT graduates who went to the workforce took jobs not in engineering or science, but rather in management consulting or finance (and even during these trying times, about 30% of such MIT graduates take jobs in consulting or finance), despite the fact that an engineering/science major has practically nothing to do with consulting or finance. Similarly, numerous blogs and news articles have noted how Harvard undergraduates have flocked to investment banking in the previous decade, despite Harvard not offering any major/concentration having anything closely related to investment banking. {Even the economics undergraduate major is, as any economist would tell you, at best only tangentially related to the financial system, and as we have all learned so painfully, the economics profession understands embarrassingly little about how the world’s underlying financial infrastructure actually works - or more accurately, doesn’t work.}</p>

<p>Hence, people rationally prefer Ivies (or other high-prestige schools) not in order, as you put it, to ‘give the average idiot layperson a hard-on’, but rather to, following your imagery, ‘give their targeted recruiters a hard-on’. The blunt truth is that if you attend some low-prestige school, you’re not going to get an offer from McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, no matter how strong any individual program at that school may be. In fact, you’re not even going to get an interview. Those firms recruit at only a select group of high-prestige schools, and if you don’t happen to be attending one of those schools, you’re not going to get a job from them. Such behavior may be entirely rational on the part of the firms, as they are selling the cachet of their employees to their clients, which is clearly easier to do when their employees are adorned with elite degrees. But even if you disagree with those recruiting practices, the fact is, whether we like it or not, they’re not going to change. If you want a job with those firms, then you need to attend the type of school that they desire. </p>

<p>But even putting finance and consulting aside and broadening the discussion to the braod spectrum of jobs taken by college graduates, one can see how irrelevant the strength of the specific program is to most students. Who cares if you graduated from the #1 ranked English program in the country if you’re not actually going to take a job that is closely related to the English major? As an illustrative point, consider the job outcomes of English graduates from Berkeley - which according to USNews has the #1 ranked English department in the country. Most of them did not take jobs that were closely related to the major. {On the other hand, I do see a dancer, a waitress, a lumber puller, and a head cashier at Barnes and Nobles.} Even those English majors who decided to pursue graduate school often times did not pursue studies that are closely related to the English major. For example, I see a bunch of English grads heading to med school and one person heading off to Harvard Business School. What exactly does that have to do with the English major? </p>

<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2006/English.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2006/English.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>"…the specific academic program to which they’re applying (which is the real impact factor for post-graduate job prospects) "</p>

<p>Depends on how “specific” we’re talking . If you mean there’s distinction made between a politics major vs. a history major from the same college, then I’d partly agree with Sakky, most people not in either area would not make much of a mental distinction, if any. People in a particular area might know & care, but that’s relatively few. Likewise, many people would not make much distinction between a chemical engineering major and a mechanical engineering major from the same college, unless they were employers or grad schools in those fields. However the employers and grad schools actually in these fields would know, and maybe care, and that may be significant to plenty of those engineering students.Though by no means all of them.</p>

<p>But stepping back a step less “specific”, many or most people who went to college, particulary those who themselves went through competitive college admissions and then college, would certainly distiinguish between, and have preconceived mental images of, say, Arts & Sciences college majors generally vs. Engineering college majors generally. And certainly at the college level, institutions have reputations that can be distinguished by many decision-makers of relevance to them.</p>

<p>A guy recruiting entry level hires would probably have a distinct image of a Berkeley engineering major vs. a Berkeley Poli Sci major, don’t you think? I certainly do. And if he’s hiring liberal arts grads on-campus he probably has a mental image of a Stanford Poli Sci major vs. a Syracuse poli sci major. As for a Stanford poli-sci major vs. a Stanford history major, probably not, that’s too specific. But as to a liberal arts major generally, yes at that level they would have a distinct impression, one that is not necessarily identical to their impression of a electrical enginering major from the same university.</p>

<p>Does the same thing enter your mnd when you think of Penn’s college of Nursing as Wharton? Not mine. Would I be likely to distinguish between a finance major and a marketing major at Wharton? Much less clearly.</p>

<p>If specific programs really made no difference, then all prospective Ibankers should apply to Penn’s College of Nursing, which has a higher admit rate than Wharton.</p>

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<p>But that only reinforces the point that the strength of specific majors don’t really matter that much. If a school has a #1 ranked history major and a #20 ranked political science program, that hardly means that you’re hurting yourself by choosing to major in poli-sci at that school (as opposed to attending another school with a higher-ranked poli-sci program), because most employers will make little distinction between those two majors anyway. Like I said, if you’re not actually going to become a political scientist - which most poli-sci majors won’t - who really cares how strong your poli-sci program is? </p>

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<p>Yet that really doesn’t seem to matter for many of the most desirable employers, because, to extend your analogy, at the end of the day, the top consulting and finance firms hire both Berkeley/Stanford liberal arts and engineering students. And, whether we agree with it or not, consulting and finance are some of the most desirable employers for graduates of top schools. Whatever distinction those employers may make between lib arts vs. engineering graduates seem to be irrelevant in the hiring process, for, as a graduating student, all that really matters is whether you receive the job offer you want or not. </p>

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<p>Well, there’s clearly something to be said for studying something you actually enjoy. Presumably those wanting to be Ibankers wouldn’t want to have to actually study nursing for 4 years. By the same token, I myself have said that if you know right from the very beginning that you want to be a banker and don’t enjoy engineering, don’t major in engineering at MIT, despite the fact that a shockingly high percentage of MIT engineers do in fact become bankers. Completing an MIT engineering major is too painful if you don’t actually enjoy engineering - heck, you might even flunk out entirely. You should either major in management at the Sloan School, or consider going to a different (easier) school altogether (like, well, Stanford). I suspect that very few people actually are able to finish an engineering degree at MIT who don’t actually enjoy engineering.</p>

<p>What seems to be far more likely is that those students do actually enjoy engineering - and would be perfectly content with working as engineers for a career - but are also willing to try to obtain a better opportunity, and, right or wrong, consulting and finance are viewed as better opportunities. </p>

<p>Heck, I know a bunch of MIT undergrad engineers who enjoyed engineering, performed well, and had been admitted to pursue engineering graduate studies at top grad programs, including back at MIT itself. But they turned those programs down to take jobs in consulting and banking. Heck, there are even many new MIT engineering PhD graduates who take jobs not in engineering, either industry or academia, but rather in consulting or banking. </p>

<p>So it all leads back to a basic question - if you don’t end up pursuing a career commensurate to a particular field - even one in which you obtained a PhD - who really cares how strong a particular school’s program is in that field? MIT may have the #1 ranked Mechanical Engineering program in the country according to USNews, but I’m not sure how relevant that is to all those newly minted MIT PhD mechanical engineering graduates who now work at McKinsey.</p>

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<p>The relevant question is not whether there may be distinctions amongst various career pathways within the same company, but rather should you turn down a more prestigious generalist school for a less prestigious school with a stronger specific program as bcpsleeperkid recommended. Sure, I agree that an Ivy engineering student who is hired at McKinsey may be assigned to different, more technically oriented projects than a student from the same Ivy who majored in liberal arts and who is hired at McKinsey. But that’s a relatively minor difference, for at the end of the day, what matters is that they were both hired by McKinsey. Contrast that with most lower-tier schools with which you won’t be hired by McKinsey in any capacity. Put another way, the hardest part of those types of jobs is simply getting hired in the first place. </p>

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<p>Well, I never said it was the only consideration. Obviously recruiting plays a heavy role - and Wharton has its own dedicated recruiting system that the nursing students (I believe) are not allowed to access. In fact, that aligns with my general point: rather than choose a program for its specific academic strengths, many students choose a program because of its access to desirable employers. Who cares how academically strong your specific program is if it provides access to the employers that you want? </p>

<p>Furthermore, there is also something to be said for networking, particularly for a socially-oriented career such as banking. Arguably the biggest reason (after the brand) for people to attend any top business school, whether for undergrad or an MBA, is to build a professional network that they will be able to utilize for their entire careers. Right now, as it stands, most Penn nursing students probably want to be nurses, which is not a professional network that is going to help you as a future banker.</p>

<p>But speaking of that, let me proffer the following story. I recall a guy, not at Penn, but at some other school that shall remain unnamed, who used to hang around the nursing school of his university and even sometimes took classes there, even though he had no interest in nursing, and was actually more interested in becoming a banker. Why? Simple: he was doing it to meet women. However offputting that may seem, you can’t really argue with success, as he always seemed to have a date with a nursing student every weekend. He’s a wily example of somebody who used a school not because he cared about the academics, but just to meet people that he wanted to meet. {Similarly, I remember some engineering students who took elective coursework in Art History or Poetry with the express intent of meeting women. You can’t exactly meet a whole lot of women via engineering classes.}</p>

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<p>Just because people with different majors are both hired at particular organizations, does not mean they are all hired for the identical jobs within those organizations, have identical career paths once they get there, or that no distinctions are made between majors or colleges. It also does not mean that people with other majors, or from other colleges, within that same university have identically equal shots at those same opportunities, even at those same employers. Distinctions are made, and they make a difference at some level. Whether you see them or not. Within the Ibank, you will see certain people leading working groups and in line for generalist management and account responsibility, and other people doing primarliy quant work and largely-analytically based specialist work. And other people doing IT work. And secretaries. Not every job at these organizations is the same. People are hired for particular jobs based on their perceived abilities, and often one’s major and college can be useful indicators to help decipher what those may be.</p>

<p>I, for one, do not believe loving your major is the only issue for Penn’s nursing grads seeking Ibank positions. I read on CC Ross grads get jobs at my former bank- though I never saw any. I doubt the secondary education majors at the same university get equally recruited there too, for those same jobs. If someone actually believes employers make no distinction then the secondary education majors would have just the same shot as the Ross grads, so we should see lots of them, right?</p>

<p>Should recruiters at the School of Pharmacy recruit at the business school, and the education school, all for the exact same jobs? </p>

<p>Hey I need a nutritionist. I think I should go recruit for that at a university’s engineering school. After all, major makes no difference. Good idea, don’t you think??</p>

<p>A shockingly high percentage of MIT engineering students become engineers or research scientists, compared to the pool of university students at large, and most of them probably found their particular major pretty relevant. As did their employers or grad schools, in all likelihood. To the extent they wind up doing work at an Ibank that draws on the particular skills and abilities that their major broadly indicated and/or developed, the same can be said to an extent for the subset that went in that direction.</p>

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<p>.(. but only to an extent, actually i think a lot of those people would have been better served, down the road, studying other things.)</p>