No one alive thinks attending an Ivy+ school is a 100% guarantee of success.
No one alive thinks not attending an Ivy+ school is a 100% guarantee of failure.
Still, it is okay (even on this website) to acknowledge the benefits of highly selective universities, corporations, groups, institutions, etc.
This is another thing with LACs where at least among broad peers, there can be some “icing” things which could matter to a given student but are not amenable to easy rankings. Various LACs might have some grad programs, might be in some sort of consortium, might be in a dual degree program, might have some sort of other course-sharing arrangement with another college . . . and then the utility of that can vary by subject, how it actually works in practice (including transportation options), and on and on.
So of course if anything you are deciding much depends on these sorts of things, you really have to dig in. Which is fine, but rankings are not really going to help.
I think for a department like Math, it absolutely makes a big difference to have grad-level courses in reserve for spikey undergrad majors. Burning through the Math course catalog is a worry at even the tippiest LACs.
^^ another reason the 6-year graduation rate is not a BS measurement and is not reflective of an attempt to dumb down the process. Lots of kids have to take longer than 4 years to graduate, for all kinds of valid reasons, and it does not mean they’re slackers.
Actually- I think a lot of people think it is - and a lot that post on here, asking for chance mes that are so desperate to attend.
Once they get there and/or graduate and live life, this may become true.
Yeah, I am not sure about “100%”, but there does seem to be an attitude in certain social (not least social media) circles that once you enroll at an Ivy, the path to prestigious and highly lucrative careers is a smooth roll downhill from there.
Then once you get there, you realize the game/competition just continues.
Now, of course if you do well in your classes, and make use of your advisors, internship office, and career counselors, and develop your networking/interviewing/social skills, and so on, it is quite true you will very likely end up with some good options for your next step.
But as many studies have shown, that is equally true if the same kid goes to, say, a flagship public or a good non-Ivy+ private and does those same things. And more colleges than those.
The difference is (maybe) for a few extremely selective next steps, which may also select from various publics and other privates, but maybe at a slightly higher rate from at least certain Ivy+ colleges.
But for those specific positions, the internal competition is intense.
If you work hard and do all the right things, your chances for success are better coming from a highly selective school, company, etc. No one thinks it is a cakewalk.
Equally true? No. No study says that. I’ve seen all the studies.
So what I was referring to is things like the Dale and Krueger study, and the recent Chetty study. Here is a relevant paragraph from the latter:
Using this design, we find that being admitted to an Ivy-Plus college increases students’ chances of achieving upper-tail success on both monetary and non monetary dimensions. Relative to those rejected from the waitlist, applicants admitted from the waitlist are significantly more likely to reach the top 1% of the income distribution, attend an elite graduate school, and work at a prestigious firm. In contrast, we find a small and statistically insignificant impact of admission from the waitlist on mean earning ranks and the probability of reaching the top quartile of the income distribution; the causal impacts of Ivy-Plus colleges are concentrated entirely in reaching the upper tail of the distribution, consistent with the predominance of students from such colleges in positions of leadership that motivated this study.
They further explain:
These findings differ from a well-known set of studies which conclude that attending a more selective college in the U.S. has little impact on students’ earnings (Dale and Krueger 2002, Dale and Krueger 2014, Mountjoy and Hickman 2021, Ge, Isaac, and A. R. Miller 2022). To investigate why our conclusions differ, we replicate the research design used in those studies by comparing earnings outcomes for students who attend different colleges, controlling for the set of colleges to which they were admitted. This design yields estimates very similar to and statistically indistinguishable from those obtained from our first research design: students who choose to attend Ivy-Plus colleges instead of state flagship colleges (conditional on being admitted to both) are significantly more likely to reach the top 1% of the income distribution, attend an elite graduate school, and work at prestigious firms. However, once again, we find very small impacts of attending an Ivy-Plus on average earnings, consistent with the findings of Dale and Krueger (2002) who only estimated impacts on average earnings, perhaps due to smaller sample sizes.
OK, so what I was previously describing is what happens when you are NOT looking at tail outcomes. These non-tail outcomes are still very good outcomes–these are people typically having successful upper-middle-class careers and such, just not in the “top 1%” tail. And what these studies are suggesting is for the bulk of the students at these colleges who end up in those non-tail outcomes, their college choice apparently made no statistically significant difference in their prospects.
Now, of course some people are interested in tail outcomes. But again, even at the Ivy+, most graduates will not get tail outcomes. So, you still have to compete against your fellow students to get those sorts of tail outcomes.
In contrast, if you are content with just being the sort of middle-of-the-class Ivy+ graduate who gets a non-tail outcome, there is no real evidence in these studies that you could not have accomplished that just as well by going to a different sort of college.
People want a shot at that outcome. They know it involves hard work and some luck.
That says it all.
Related: even data controlling for major against salary can miss (or misconstrue the outcome for) interesting people, like my favorite friend in college who was a religion major, but was pre-med, which of course is not a major in and of itself. He’s a very successful physician. But that’s a very weird data point - super high salary for the major - for certain types of rankings. An outlier for sure, but they exist.
I don’t think this is as complicated or prohibitive as your comment describes. Presumably, if you decide in the Spring of sophomore year that you’re really into XYZ and want to major in it, it’s because, among the exploration you’ve done in your 1st and 2nd year, there’s some coursework in XYZ. So it’s not like you’re starting from scratch.
I know a lot of people who did this, including in STEM fields. You may have to overweight XYZ in your courses moving forward, but it’s very much a thing and not really all that difficult.
The Chetty study focused on the following 3 outcomes, for which it found a benefit to attending Ivy+ colleges, particularly for kids from top 1% income families.
The reasons why attending an Ivy+ may increase chance of these 3 specific outcomes are not reviewed in much detail, leaving much open to speculation. For example, the authors do not review how much of #1 relates to being a circular definition vs preference for having attended Ivy+
I was an engineering major at Stanford. I was among the ~35% of engineering majors at Stanford who does a co-terminal masters, which involves simultaneously working towards BS and MS, so I fell in group number 2. Had I not attended Stanford, I would have been far less likely to do a co-terminal masters at Stanford for grad school. Attending Stanford for undergrad no doubt increased chance of #2 for me.
In contrast, one of my relatives was also an engineering major. He did his BS at GeorgiaTech and continued to a PhD at GeorgiaTech. Attending GT for undergrad no doubt increased chance of attending GT for grad. He did not attend an Ivy+ (or one of the 5 publics) for grad school, so he would not fall into group number 2. The authors do not separate how much of the increase in outcome relates to this type of home school bias vs admissions preference for having attended an Ivy+.
#3 only relates to a small minority of students. The study implies that the vast majority do not see an significant income increase from attending an Ivy+. The author’s explicitly point on similar results to past studies like Dale & Krueger, which found little difference in median/average income for attending Ivy+ after controlling for individual student differences. I suspect the higher rate of $650k income at age 33 largely relates to the connection between “elite” finance and Ivy+. However, the authors do not review which fields of employment have the >$650k income and how much of the increased rate of those fields relates to students changing planned career field during college vs direct preference for having attended Ivy+.
My point is it’s not as simple as “that says it all.”
Well, some people do.
Personally, I have been happy to not use my fancy college degree (I went to an Ivy+) to pursue such outcomes, or at least not in the financial sense. I have called my shots in ways that very much matter to me, but would not necessarily show up in a study of “top 1%” outcomes.
In any event, that was my point. Based on what I have seen in online conversations over the last year or so, a lot of people really do not seem to understand this basic point. They do seem to think enrolling at an Ivy+ or whatever automatically gives you a “boost” when it comes to getting these sorts of top 1% outcomes. It typically does not. You have to then also beat out the majority of other people who also enrolled at an Ivy+ and are pursuing such outcomes.
And actually, it is just like HS to college, where it isn’t just a matter of applying intelligence and effort. You have to understand the game, you often have to be good at social relationships and networking, and so on.
And I think there is a noticeable overlap between the sorts of people who end up sorta shocked at how holistic review works at these colleges, and a similar unawareness that in many ways that is just a middle round in the same long extended holistic contest that will continue both during college and indeed beyond.
I note this is more of an outlier for pre-med than pre-law. A whole bunch of future highly-compensated attorneys are lurking around in all sorts of majors at highly selective colleges.
The difference, of course, is the pre-reqs for med school create an efficiency if you then also major in something where the pre-reqs count as classes toward your major. Your friend showed why that is not a hard rule, but it certainly becomes a reason for a high correlation between pre-meds and a certain set of majors.
But there are no pre-reqs for law school. So . . . anything goes.
Yeah, I started in one major, but explored another interest that kept developing. In junior year, I finally decided to switch from X to Y. There was actually an established X and Y major that would have worked best for my courses to that point, but I talked to people in the Y department about an interest in grad school, and they advised me to just switch entirely to Y and load up on Y classes.
So I did, and it all worked out.
Incidentally, stories like that are where actually attending a very good general college might really help. I don’t think this is limited to Ivy+, but because both the X and Y departments were pretty good, and the college in general was pretty good, I could switch late, still end up with departmental honors, still get great professor recommendations, and still get into top grad programs in Y.
I do wonder if that would have worked out if I had chosen, say, a college very good for X, but not so much for Y. Would a late switch have worked out as well? Maybe not, I’ll never know.
But still, this is one of the good reasons in my view to prefer a good general college. And as usual, generic rankings don’t capture this sort of thing well, including because they tend to want to reward good specialist schools.
Per that study,if you are already rich, not much benefit. If you aren’t, substantial benefit.
These are always fascinating conversations. People seem viscerally upset that highly selective schools, companies, groups etc. can provide some advantages. Just because you don’t want something to be true doesn’t make it untrue.
No one in this conversation has argued that Ivy+ schools never convey an advantage to anyone.
Personally, I have only been pointing out the verified advantage is largely limited to a subset of outcomes that only a minority of Ivy+ graduates will end up getting, and that the competition to be one of those minority can be very intense.
This is not denying this effect exists, but I think it is helpful information to understand all this when contemplating college choice.
And to the point of this thread, it is the kind of thing which rationally will matter to some but not other people choosing a college, which is why generic rankings based on this sort of thing are conceptually flawed.
I think that once you narrow it down to a handful of jobs where 1) burnout is very high but, 2) the chances of early retirement are also high, the pool of h/s seniors interested in that sort of career arc begins to shrink very sharply. Americans clearly prefer jobs with some separation between work and personal life.
Some of the people commenting in this conversation, in past threads, have said exactly that.
Although the legal profession specifically is notorious for kids getting to the point they have a mountain of debt and feel stuck in a high-hours job they hate until it is paid off. At which point many exit the profession.
But again that is in part because it is typically pretty easy for a smart kid who is good at school to kinda default into going to law school if they don’t figure out something else first. Which is not how anyone should decide to go to law school. But it happens a lot, and indeed some firms basically have a business model which depends on it.
I can’t answer for that, but I don’t see anything immediately before you posted your comment that warranted triggering such a response.
Again, the real point of this is that these are actually nuanced issues, not everyone gets the same or indeed any benefit from choosing a given college, and that is why generic rankings don’t make sense.
As soon as you get into a mindset where you are arguing that a given college is always better, or never better, you are almost surely overgeneralizing. In almost any case, it is better for some sorts of people and not others.
No one has argued this.