Money's "Best Value" college rankings are out and they are somewhat surprising

Parents Forum
121

“I find it strange that the salaries from so many schools- from good to middling schools- seem to so often be clustered in the $50/$60k range. Really? Graduates from Podunk U. make only $10k less than graduates from Yale?”

I don’t see why that’s so surprising. In the vast majority of career fields, graduates from Yale work side-by-side with graduates with Podunk U with salary differentiation based on role and work ability, not school. It’s only a handful of careers (i-banking, law, etc.) where there is such stratification where the Yale grads work only with other elite grads and the Podunk U grads are nowhere to be found.

What’s so surprising is that some people who pride themselves on their sophistication because they went to elite schools don’t seem to be aware of this. It’s pretty self-absorbed to think “gosh, I’m in a profession that’s stratified, so therefore all professions must be equally stratified just like mine.”

122

Pizza girl it’s definitely true for many professions because for many an undergraduate degree is mostly just a stepping stone to various grad schools. So while going to Yale will help get into med school it will have no outcome on your income. This is true for many many careers. On the other hand there are some very specialized careers where HPYS dominate the landscape. Just for fun one can easily check out just how many Yale/Harvard types dominate in powerful government positions and the media. I already mentioned the SCOTUS as an example but there are many others. bclintonk no one is arguing with your simplistic example but it’s just not how elite college admission works. Class size in only a minor factor because overall there are far more qualified applicants than there are truly elite positions. As we discussed before the admission stats of the top LAC’s are very deceiving because of the huge number(relative to class size) of the sport hooked admitted students. These students go ED because they have been all but guaranteed of admission to Williams or Pomona. Getting in unhooked to the top LAC’s is very difficult and not accurately reflected in the admit rates. For fun go look at the admission posts at Pomona or CMC in April and look at the incredible stats of rejected students for the two most selective LACs. On the other hand getting in if a sports recruit is much much easier because the level of sports is good but far below the ives. If you are big and a decent athlete football is the way in to the top LAC’s for students with merely good stats. Football at the ives requires real talent and Stanford is a league above that. At any rate elite admission is a very complicated byzantine system these days and it has nothing to do per se with class size.

123

SAY, first of all, don’t patronize me as if I know nothing about elite admission. I went to an elite school, as did my spouse, and I have two children recently graduated from an elite research university and an elite LAC.

Yes, there are some very specialized careers where HYPS etc dominate the landscape. That was the whole freaking point of my post. Specialized. A handful.

It astounds me that some of the people who attended elite schools and went into those specialized careers don’t have the worldliness of understanding that the careers and workplaces where there is this level of stratification are few and far between, and that in most careers elite grads and non-elite grads work side by side.

The poster who acted surprised is someone who has indicated in the past that he went to Harvard Law School. I don’t know how you get out of Harvard Law School, work and function in the real world, and be “surprised” that there aren’t huge income differentials between elite and non-elite schools. It’s kind of obvious to anyone with two eyes.

124

@say Yale may not help get into med school. I’m just summarizing others and I may be mistaken, but that’s what I’ve read on this forum. According to that, med school-focsed people think this is the case (that the bigger name the undergrad school the easier it is to get into med school) until they try it and then they find out that they have to be top of their class regardless of where they go to school. If you’re at Yale, you have to beat out the other Yalies to get med school and do the MCAT etc. That’s harder than being a Yale-type student at a lower tier school. There you will be on top. Med school is fairly standardized it seems. You either do get the grades in chemistry and the MCAT and do your clinical work, or you don’t. Schools like Yale or Princeton may help towards an academic career in medicine, but for practice alone, there are many paths and many folks on this forum say: be sure to go t an undergrad where you can be sure to be in the top of your class, not the bottom, to better ensure that you’re accepted to med school.

125

Pizza girl law school unlike medical school is perfect example how in some careers where you went to school does matter. The differences in income and job outcomes for the top five law schools is very different even from the next nine. Now this of course is slightly different from college but the same things occurs there. If you look at the admitted students at the top grad school programs the very top schools are massively overrepresented. In many top programs something like half of the accepted students come from just a handful of colleges. All over this site every year you can find posts were people claim going to HPYS is a golden ticket to sure success or that it makes little to no difference and strangely both statements are true.

126

@SAY I would look at Harvard Law Schools schools that they drew from to accept students. You may be surprised at the variety there too. http://www.thecollegesolution.com/where-harvard-law-students-come-from/

127

Dusty it is true that the other students are also very smart but HPYS have solved that by well known grade inflation. They figure a traditional class curve is unfair when almost everyone in the room has an SAT over 2300. It’s still hard to get a full A but also hard to get below a B. Something like close to half the students get an A or A- in many classes. The well known grade killers are U of Chicago, Cornell, NU, and a few LAC’s like Swarthmore and Carleton. Also keep in mind some state schools like UCLA, UCB, UCSD have like 50% Asians overall and higher than that in the STEM fields so they are also quite competitive for a pre-med. The MCAT is rarely a problem for these students because they are very good at standardized tests. But yes one can get admitted to med school from a wide range of colleges.

128

Dusty this is taken straight from the web site of a person who makes a living giving advice to pre-law students.

"What’s the difference between someone who gets accepted into Harvard Law and someone who doesn’t? Experience tells me there are 2 universal traits of people who get into Top Law Schools: the quality of their undergraduate education, and their involvement in extracurricular activities. They also have high LSAT scores, unless they have overcome significant obstacles in their life in order to excel in academics and extracurriculars.

QUALITY OF UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION
Attending a prestigious undergraduate institution puts you at an advantage in the eyes of the Top Law Schools. You’ve been tested against the nation’s best and brightest, and – presumably – engaged in rigorous coursework with renowned professors. Earning top grades and writing a thesis in this environment is something Top Law Schools appreciate. It also makes it highly likely you will have a letter of recommendation (or two or three) from professors who are truly in a position to evaluate your work and can compare you to past students who have gone on to Top Law Schools. An applicant from this background, especially one who has supplemented their time with volunteer efforts, travel, and interesting and well-rounded pursuits, is ideally positioned for success in the law school admission process. For the Fall 2014 application cycle to date, my applicants who have been admitted to Harvard Law attended Berkeley, Yale, Penn, Stanford, Dartmouth, and (yes) Harvard for their undergrad work.

Top Law Schools are unlikely to admit people who attended less impressive undergraduate schools, especially if there were opportunities you did not pursue (such as independent academic research, challenging courses, and intellectual pursuits outside of the classroom.) However, if you have a near perfect GPA and stellar academic accomplishments at a well-known and respected school, especially where your major is known to be rigorous, the fact that you didn’t go Ivy League may be forgiven. Examples include studying Philosophy at Rutgers and Business at the University of Southern California because these are departments that are particularly respected within the academic community.

If you started at a community college, changed majors several times, attended a state university near home where you had few opportunities to interact with faculty members, majored in something not known for rigor, like Communications or Legal Studies, and still only managed a 3.5 GPA, Top Law Schools are unlikely to take you seriously."

Dusty are you aware that the majority of the class is not coming straight from college? For the students coming more or less straight from college the vast majority come from top schools. But this obviously becomes less important for students like President Obama who have worked for a number of years before attending. The other thing to keep in mind is that they are massively committed to diversity and AA and search out non-traditional applicants. If you are just a regular student this doesn’t apply to you.

129

@bclintonk you are oversimplifying the reality of college admissions to make class size so critically important.

The school can decide admission strategy to shrink the admit rate and lower the yield rate. All without changing the quality of its pool or entering class.

School A decides they want to push Early Decision. In fact they will now take 50% of their class ED. These students have in effect 100% yield.

So if they had per your example a class of 1500, they would accept and enroll 750 ED. Now these would include perhaps 200 athletes and all the other flavors of special admits. For arguments sake they have 3,000 ED applicants and accept 25% of them.

Now they have 750 seats to fill. And per your example 27,000 applicants. To keep to your 50% overall yield example they would accept 2250 students and 33% would enroll (750). Their RD admissions rate would be 8.33%.

Overall admit rate 10%, yield rate 50%.

Further manipulation of the ED% could drive in more applications (both ED and RD), raise yield, lower the RD and ED rates… And move rankings. Which then continues the move in numbers.

130

bclintonk most elite schools have in fact already done this and take a huge percentage ED. While I agree with your math the hooker in the equation is that there are vastly more students with high SAT/GPA’s than can ever be admitted anyway. Like 80 schools have the 75th percentile at 1400 or above so there are no shortages of students with good scores. To make matters worse many hooked students gain admission with SAT math and verbal below 1400 which is what makes the process so very competitive. Keep in mind the SAT average score for the elite schools includes all the hooked students which gives false hope to non-hooked students with similar scores. To gain admission as a non-hooked student the 75th% is a good benchmark.

http://www.stateuniversity.com/rank/sat_75pctl_rank.html

131

Exactly, but in a way this only underscores my point. Making heavy use of ED to fill, say, 40% or 50% of the entering class is (or can be) a way to effectively shrink the size of the entering class that needs to be filled in the RD round, precisely so as to reduce the admit rate, while also boosting effective yield overall. It works only because of the mathematical phenomenon I describe—the smaller a class you have to fill from a given applicant pool, the lower your admit rate from that pool.

It’s a well-known trick, but not every school can use it. Many schools aren’t viewed as attractive enough to draw a sufficiently large and deep pool of qualified ED applicants. And you need to be careful that the ED admits don’t dilute the overall stats of your entering class. Yes, it’s better to squeeze the recruited athletes in there because you’re going to admit them anyway so you’re probably better off locking them up for the coach while protecting your yield. But if you’re admitting as much as 40-50% of your class ED (as some schools do), you want to be sure that the SAT/ACT and GPA medians for that group are at least in the ballpark of your overall targets for the class as a whole. That’s what makes legacies so attractive in the ED round. Most schools probably get a higher yield for legacies that for non-legacies anyway, but if you signal that legacy will only be an advantage in the ED round (as at Penn, for example), you can boost the yield for admitted legacies to nearly 100%, and a strong school with a strong reputation (like Penn) can undoubtedly attract many well-credentialed legacies in the ED round, enough to balance off whatever SAT/ACT and GPA sacrifices the school is willing to make to lock up its recruited athletes. (And of course, many recruited athletes have outstanding academic credentials in their own right, but many elite schools will cut the most highly prized athletic recruits a little extra slack to get them in the door).

132
I would have thought most people would be completely bored with "prestige" discussions by now.

But if you’re going to look at statistics, you should look at them honestly. When it comes to law school classes you have to look at the number of students that come from each undergrad institution.

Here is a link to data from Yale Law school, which is the most selective and prestigious law school in the country. With a yield over 80%, Yale can pretty much do anything it wants to.

http://www.yale.edu/printer/bulletin/htmlfiles/law/law-school-students.html

You can see that even though YLS’s students come from 165 distinct undergrads, more than 1/3 of the class comes from just 5 schools - Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Stanford. Almost 1/2 the class comes from just 10 schools (IIRC, Harvard Law isn’t much different; though it’s representation is a little less skewed since HLS’s entering class is gigantic and they have to go deeper in the pool).

So top law schools definitely admit very disproportionately from “elite” schools, about a factor of 100 times more than their “fair share”. How much of this is due to actually attending an elite school vs. being the type of person who gets in is anyone’s guess.

Still, it seems to me that the overall conclusions are pretty obvious to any mature adult:

  1. you can measure success in many different ways
  2. where you go to college can make a big difference when you’re just starting out in certain fields
  3. there are lots of ways to be successful without going to a “elite” school;
  4. a highly disproportionate number of elite school grads do really well in any number of ways, but most are just perfectly happy “ordinary” people
  5. a lot of this may be because of “selection effects” rather than “treatment effects”, so who knows whether going to an “elite” college makes as much of a difference as some people think.
  6. luck matters an awful lot
  7. your mom will still love you no matter what college you go to, so unless you or your child is in the admission process it’s usually stupid to worry about this stuff.
  8. none of this matters if you don’t have good health, a good spouse, a healthy family, good opportunities, etc.
133

@SAY, I don’t know where you dug up that extended quote in post #127, but it runs strongly counter to conventional wisdom among law school faculty and deans (several of whom I know quite well and speak with regularly), law students, prospective law students, and websites that advise prospective law students. The standard narrative is that, except at Yale Law School and possibly Stanford Law School, law school admissions is now purely a numbers game: if your LSAT score and GPA are above the school’s medians, you’re golden, regardless of your undergraduate institution. This is said to be true even at Harvard, which has an entering class roughly three time the size of Yale or Stanford; the latter schools can be more picky and idiosyncratic because they have fewer places to fill. This is largely due to the pernicious influence of US News rankings on law school admissions practices. Law school deans, faculties, and admissions officers regularly lament this, saying that in past generations law school admissions was a much more holistic practice, so that things like undergraduate rigor mattered; but they now complain that they feel enslaved by the US News rankings. They’d love to throw off the US News yoke, but they can’t afford to do anything that will cause their own school’s ranking to drop, risking the wrath of alumni, donors, central university administrators, trustees, and their own students if they do. Moreover, any bump downward in their US News rankings only weakens their competitive position with respect to future rounds of top applicants, who tend to slavishly follow the US News rankings from a consumer perspective.

At law schools much below the top 4 or 5, you don’t even need to be above both the school’s LSAT median and its GPA median; generally, either will do, as the schools are adept at flip-flopping admits to balance off high-GPA but below-median LSAT admits against high-LSAT but below-median GPA admits so as to maintain both their LSAT and GPA medians at target levels. Generally, though, there are fewer top LSAT scores than top GPAs, so it’s probably somewhat more advantageous to have a good LSAT score.

And this competition for top LSATs and top GPAs has gotten even fiercer in the past few years as the bottom dropped out of the law school applicant pool, leaving law schools chasing after a declining pool of high LSATs and high GPAs, desperate to maintain their own US News rankings…

It’s true that Harvard, Yale, and other elite colleges and universities do especially well in placing their graduates in top law schools. In part this is due to grade inflation at those schools—possibly well deserved, but it’s just a well-known fact that As fly around more freely at many of the most elite private schools (with notable exceptions like Princeton and Chicago) and median GPAs are much higher than at public institutions. But it’s also partly that the students who get into those schools in the first place tend to be the kinds of students who do exceptionally well at standardized tests, and people who ace the SAT also tend to ace the LSAT. There’s little, if any, evidence that it’s value added by the institution itself that makes a critical difference.

134

Well said, @al2simon! Only a portion of the tippy top elite college graduates choose to and are able to get in the few career tracks and/or top law/business schools where elite undergraduate degrees matter, so it’s probably true that for the majority such a degree may be an “overkill”. However, since most 18 year olds don’t know how their interests and competences will evolve and what they will eventually end up in life, it makes sense to keep those doors open or open a little wider when possible, but don’t kill yourself over an admission ticket to those schools. You will be just fine without it!

135

“So top law schools definitely admit very disproportionately from “elite” schools, about a factor of 100 times more than their “fair share”. How much of this is due to actually attending an elite school vs. being the type of person who gets in is anyone’s guess.”

Well, actually, you don’t know if they admit disproportionately from elite schools or not, because you don’t know the distribution of the applicant pool. Knowing that 33% of YLS students went to those 5 undergrads means absolutely nothing unless you know what % of the YLS applicant pool came from those 5 undergrads. It sounds like people make a lot of assumptions that the applicant pool looks like the total undergrad population and therefore conclude that certain schools are “overrepresented,” but that’s not a very smart assumption.

136

al2simon that is a very good and complete post. For many decades knowledgable people have recognized that the top schools provide a disproportional advantage in certain fields. For goodness sakes how can anyone dispute the obvious since that what has caused most of the insanity of college admissions these days. Yes bclintonk the law school world has imploded the last few years but that doesn’t change the point. In almost every highly competitive field the top schools will always be very disproportionally represented though much of this is because of the nature of the student rather than the schools themselves as stated by al2simon. Had the top students gone to the best state schools they still would be superstars but mostly that doesn’t happen because of FA from huge endowments and many other reasons. Anyone who attends such a school is quickly well aware it’s quite different from the other colleges. A quick walk through the schools art museum or library where world class paintings or original copies of Audubon’s Birds of America are on display make this clear.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/graham-arader/obsessed-cartography_b_2237173.html

137

It’s actually very easy to conclude that the schools are very overrepresented. Schools like YLS keep track of the % of all applicants nationwide with high LSAT (170+) scores who apply. The reason they do this is to help with outreach to low-income students and URMs. IIRC, almost 2/3’s of 175+ LSAT scorers nationwide apply to YLS and nearly 1/2 of all 170+ scorers. So those 5 undergrad schools are at least about 40 times overrepresented almost no matter what you assume about the applicant pools and what top scorers from what undergrad schools submit an application.

The clear majority of 170+ scorers who go to law school end up at a top 14. Top scoring high school students may not always apply to top undergrad schools, but by the time a student is graduating from college with the type of profile that would make them a plausible candidate for YLS they’re sophisticated enough to google “Top U.S. Law Schools” and aren’t as provincial in their outlook as you seem to be implying.

138

“The clear majority of 170+ scorers who go to law school end up at a top 14.”

Yes, and the 170+ scorers are hugely overrepresented at elite undergrads, in large part because of the high concordance between the LSAT and SAT/ACT.

I don’t know if high LSAT scorers are 40 times more likely to be clustered at HYPSM than at the median US undergrad. They sure are not evenly scattered around the country.

139

LOL. I attended the University of Michigan as an undergrad and two Ivies as a grad student (two of the three of HYP, in fact). I taught at a third Ivy for many years and have given invited academic presentations at three others, so I think I know the Ivies pretty well. As in my day, a substantial majority of the “top students” in the state of Michigan continue to choose to attend the University of Michigan–and why not? Compared to states in the Northeast, a vanishingly small percentage of the top students in Michigan attend elite private colleges. Since Michigan meets full need for in-state students, there’s no financial advantage to attending a private school, and for those who would be full-pays or qualify for only limited financial aid at the top privates, Michigan is a fabulous bargain.

I don’t think Michigan students get short-changed on libraries. The university’s library collections contain 13.8 million volumes, making them one of the 10 largest library collections in North America. They include an original of Audubon’s Birds of America (funny you should mention it, as this was the very first book the University of Michigan library ever bought); an original manuscript by Galileo in his own hand illustrating his discovery of the four moons of Jupiter; originals of publications by Copernicus, Kepler, and Euclid; the largest collection of ancient papyrus writing in the country; one of the largest and most significant collections of ancient Islamic manuscripts; a large collection of original Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts; and much more. Nor are Michigan students short-changed on art. The university’s art museum is one of the largest and most respected academic art museums in the country, with a diverse collection including works by Picasso, Monet, Whistler, Warhol, Helen Frankenthaler, and many more—not to mention the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology with a collection of 100,000 artifacts from ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilizations.

Don’t patronize, please. And know what you’re talking about before dismissing our great public institutions. Oh, and by the way, at $10 billion and counting—10th largest in the nation for any academic institution, public or private—Michigan’s endowment isn’t too shabby, either, and it will only continue to grow with successful completion of the university’s current $4 billion capital campaign, the largest ever undertaken by a public institution and one of the largest ever undertaken by any academic institution.

140

@Hanna If it is true that the vast majority of top students do not even try HYPSM and only apply to the top colleges in their own region, as pizzagirl often argued and which could be true, then the high SAT scorers shouldn’t be clustered or clustered to that degree in the top few. Since you acknowledge that high SAT and high LSAT are highly correlated, then a reasonable assumption would be the high LSAT would be similarly clustered/non-clustered. I think that’s what @al2simon was trying to say.