<p>Sorry, I was talking about Ph.D.s, not MD-JD-MBA in post 40</p>
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<p>No, we should tell them the truth â that there are more than 5, or 8, excellent universities in this country. Saying âbut you can always go to HYPSM for grad school!â reinforces the stupid and unsophisticated obsession with those 5. Itâs saying âYou missed the brass ring this time around, kid â but donât worry, try again for the brass ring a few years from now!â It just kicks the can down the road.</p>
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<p>Absolutely not; in real life, itâs never over until you give up trying â Grandma Moses became famous in her 90âs. However, a lot of students act like their life will be a failure if they donât get admitted to their elite dream school. If that is what drives and frustrates them at the moment, why not remind them that they have a possible second chance down the road, should they choose to pursue it?</p>
<p>Chiming in late, but I agree with you 100%, psych_ (original poster).</p>
<p>Because it reinforces stupid notions, LI. </p>
<p>âDonât worry you didnât make homecoming queen in high school ⊠You can always become one in college!â </p>
<p>âDonât worry, you didnât win the Powerball this time ⊠You can always win it next year!â</p>
<p>It reinforces that these are âelevated,â golden schools that make or break lives. Which simply isnât true.</p>
<p>It also may make an impressionable student believe a parent or the elusive âeveryoneâ expects him to go to an Ivy for grad school now that he âfailedâ to make it there for undergrad. </p>
<p>And yes, it seems adults say this when encouraging a student to forgo the stronger and possibly more expensive school. The advice accompanies a claim along the lines of âNo one cares where you get your undergrad degree.â In my kidsâ experience, quite a few employers care. Also, my son is one who always said he was going to law school but then changed his mind by junior year of college. We were all shocked. He is so glad he went to the much better school because that is likely to be the ONLY college he will attend, despite what he thought at age 17.</p>
<p>ugh. </p>
<p>okay, stop saying âyou can always go to X for grad schoolâ but really, stop saying âwhere you go countsâ. Talk about doom and gloom; high school students really donât need that pressure on them, especially when the list of âacceptableâ colleges barely numbers in the double digits.</p>
<p>Yes, employees take note when they see Harvard or Yale, but they donât discount the state university graduate. For some employers, Ivies rub them the wrong way so sometimes Ivies help and sometimes, it hurts.</p>
<p>Itâs up to the person to make what they can of their education and degree(s). The name is really just a name.</p>
<p>^Exactly. Thereâs also the reverse snobbery that occurs in places that revere their state flagships. I would for sure have had a better network in my area if I had graduated from ours instead of an âelite privateâ in a neighboring state. People tend to think not that graduates of fancy colleges are smarter, but that their parents must have been rich enough to send them there. And that in turn can fuel their belief that people who accomplish their goals through their own effort and not through advantages of birth are somehow more worthy.</p>
<p>Sometimes it counts and sometimes it doesnât. Either way, the person making the comments is unlikely to know whether it will or wonât matter for that particular student and should refrain from opining. Furthermore, there is a difference between attending Slippery Rock State College and attending Penn State. The problem is that sometimes top students get the best money offers from the lowest ranked schools on their list, so the choice ends up not being between Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, but maybe between Harvard and Eastern Carolina.</p>
<p>My D got into H and S, but her best financial offer came from Univ of Miami, and she didnât even apply there. There were plenty of people who thought she was foolish to turn down a full ride.</p>
<p>I usually see this in the context of cost, not admissions results. And that REALLY misses the point. I understand the push back of there not being one (or one group of) school(s) for u/g work, but the false equivalence that the OP is pointing out is very damaging. The best u/g fit is UNLIKELY to be the best graduate fit. </p>
<p>Even if weâre merely talking about prestige, u/g, professional schools (medicine, law, business) and graduate schools (PhD programs) are completely different and thereâs no real comparison. So âweâre saving all of our money for an Ivy grad schoolâ is missing the point. An Ivy may not be prestigious in any given field, and the notion of saving money may be silly, particularly for PhD programs, since many, many PhD students are funded.</p>
<p>(I suspect that in these conversations people donât mean âgrad schoolâ in any event. They mean professional school, where thereâs little to no funding. Thatâs a world of difference.</p>
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<p>Really? And you base this on what? One of the most successful people I know graduated from Slippery Rock. He is now a senior VP of a multinational corporation, and he never got an advanced degree after his undergrad.</p>
<p>I also know people who have become hugely successful armed with their degrees from UW-Eau Claireâone is running a multi-billion-dollar foundation and the other is president of a profitable tech company thatâs about to go public.</p>
<p>The point is, you canât say definitively that there is a difference for most people in most careers. As others have said, it has much more to do with the individual than it does his or her academic pedigree.</p>
<p>^And nothing about their success negates that fact that there is a difference between those state school experiences. Furthermore, the people currently running large businesses and organizations likely went to school 20-30 years ago, when almost everyone stayed local and just earning a degree practically guaranteed you a job. That is no longer the case.</p>
<p>I think itâs simply a way of saying âYou are not bound forever by your grade in 9th grade geometry.â</p>
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<p>Of the examples I used above, only one is âlocalâ (but yes, they graduated 20-30 years ago). And âjust earning a degreeâ may have been enough to guarantee a first job, but not to guarantee the kind of career trajectory these people (or many others) have had. I work with a lot of talented people in their 20s and 30s and itâs pretty clear which ones are going to go the farthest in their careers. Quite honestly, I donât know where most of them went to school but I can assure you the majority went to state flagships or directionals. Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, there are âminionsâ with degrees from every imaginable school, including the ones most valued on CC.</p>
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<p>Thatâs a chicken-and-egg question. It wouldnât surprise me that graduates of elite schools tend to interview for and / or cluster in occupations where employers value elite school degrees highly. So of course their experience will tell them â gosh, employers value elite school degrees â all the junior people in my industry are all like me, graduates of elite schools. </p>
<p>Likewise, graduates of âaverageâ (you all know what I mean) schools may tend to interview for and / or cluster in occupations where employers donât really care all that much about elite schools (and might even potentially ding them for being uppity, etc.). So their experience will tell them elsewise, too. </p>
<p>And both sides are correct.</p>
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<p>(Perplexed) How would they have known, and why are they making these comments to you about her perceived foolishness? Waaaay too much involvement in other peopleâs business.</p>
<p>Well, I donât want this to turn into another one of those threads, but these are the kind of ads I sometimes see: </p>
<p>"Job Title:
TOP SCHOOL, SUPERB GPA - RISK ANALYST </p>
<p>Job Description:
Job ID(20121) Must be from a top school - Cornell, Harvard, M.I.T, Stanford or similar with a minimum 3.8 GPA. Prestigious Investment Management firm located in MidtownâŠ"</p>
<p>And here is the list of campus visit places for a small firm in Chicago, taken directly from their website (so this is a company NOT in the allegedly snobby NE)⊠Not a shabby school among them, and no state schools either:</p>
<p>"University of Southern California</p>
<p>Duke University</p>
<p>Carnegie Mellon University</p>
<p>Cornell University</p>
<p>Columbia University</p>
<p>University of Pennsylvania</p>
<p>Boston College</p>
<p>Massachusetts Institute of Technology</p>
<p>Northwestern University</p>
<p>University of Chicago</p>
<p>Stanford University"</p>
<p>Note: their current staff are graduates of a mixture of schools, yet this is where they are recruiting.</p>
<p>The point is that people should keep their opinions about schools to themselves because we all have different financial situations, different educational desires, different career goals, different geographical perspectives etc. and this school business gets people really worked up. They seem to take school rankings very personally, and believe people think their student is somehow less intelligent or whatever based on the school s/he attends. That is bunk. But that doesnât mean all schools are created equal.</p>
<p>TheGFG, so?? No one has said that there arenât industries / companies where they only recruit at a handful of certain top schools with certain GPA requirements. Of course those exist. There are also plenty of industries / companies where they go to other schools and couldnât care less about elite schools. This isnât an âeither/or.â This is a âyes, and.â </p>
<p>I donât think you truly understand that there are kids graduating from Northern Illinois who get some pretty nice jobs with good starting salaries right out of Northern Illinois. Now, thatâs not compelling enough for me to send my kid to Northern Illinois, but why act as though the kid can never be employed, under some notion that the only employers out there care about elite schools?</p>
<p>It is very odd and bizarre to me how so many people on CC seem to think that the only worthwhile employment is in NYC on Wall Street in banking / investment firms. Itâs almost as though you guys arenât even aware that there is industry elsewhere.</p>
<p>I agree that the phrase can have a benign use, but also agree that it is pernicious when used to suggest that it isnât âworth itâ to attend a more selective school for undergrad.</p>
<p>By the way, even if I personally know a person from South Backwoods College who is a huge success, and a person from Princeton who is a failure, that doesnât mean that those schools are equal.</p>
<p>I totally agree that people should keep their opinions about individual schools and the general effect on high school studentsâ future to themselves.</p>
<p>I am also baffled that CC always drags out Wall Street as proof that school pedigree matters in the general career/job search. One industry!
No one is saying all schools are equal but going to a non-top 12 or (gasp!) a state university isnât going to doom a person to mediocrity; likewise, going to an Ivy doesnât confer special powers to its graduates.</p>