<p>A little something to stoke the fire. Princeton grad's opinion that supporters/detractors of the benefit or utility of "elite" schools will find interesting... certainly enough to find ammunition to support their pre-existing opinions and biases.</p>
<p>My takeaway? The prestige of one's school is not a perfect predictor of future success -- but rightly or wrongly, it can provide a nice pop when necessary.</p>
<p>guess if you have to name drop your college to get a conversation going, doesn't say much about your personality</p>
<p>if someone dropped a name, to get a comment, like oh wow, I wouldn't bite, and most people would see right through the obvious effort to impress</p>
<p>An interesting article.
I come from, as I suspect many of us do, a family that would rather scoff at the names of Harvard and Yale than aspire to them.
I have known Princeton graduates; those whom I have known were indeed of profound brilliance.
As I have heard many a time here before, perhaps people would rather say they didn't want Harvard than Harvard didn't want them.
This reaction is essentially psychological compensation, sour grapes, rationalization, etc, almost subconscious.
(My GPA is 3.34, so I'm not exactly the spitting image of a Princeton graduate either...)</p>
<p>The only Princeton graduate I ever knew was a classmate in law school. Several years after graduation while I was striving to do well at a mid size NY law firm I heard he'd made it into federal prison for insider trading.</p>
<p>Prestige shouldn't be ignored. But looking for more broadly for a good "fit" is so much more important. For me, I'm mostly concerned about a good academic (as almost anyone is, I'm sure), social and political fit. I don't want a school that doesn't emphasize what I want to study and I want an atmosphere where you can do something besides drink. On the political side of things, I wouldn't survive at a school where the college Republicans have more members than the Dems.</p>
<p>The process should be so much more complex than just fixating on prestige. My three top choices are William and Mary, Tulane, and American. William and Mary is very presitigous, very selective, Tulane moderately so, and American is probably significantly easier to get into than the other two. Still, I think I'd be just as happy and receive an equally good education at American as I would at W & M.</p>
<p>
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The only Princeton graduate I ever knew was a classmate in law school. Several years after graduation while I was striving to do well at a mid size NY law firm I heard he'd made it into federal prison for insider trading.
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<p>Well, there you have it, then. Princeton graduates are criminals.</p>
<p>He lives in Montana, is a former Mormon and married (and subsequently divorced) a gold digger 13 years younger than him. Yeah, he sounds like a really, really, awesome dude. I should bow and kiss his feet because he went to Princeton and I didnt...</p>
<p><strong>Mods, please dont suspend me, but this Kirn guy is a schmuck</strong></p>
<p>It is about the network, but it is more about work networking than school. If your Boss likes you and transfers to a different company more than likely at some point he/she will bring you along. It happens all the time.</p>
<p>I do believe that going to an Ivy League may open the doors in some fields initially; however, over time, merit counts (unless of course you want to become President). I originally thought the poster was going to propose a formula like Success = X + ivy league prestige (some co-efficient) -time (not TIME magazine!). The writer is a bit full of himself and overstates the case. For graduate, professional schools, and jobs in certain fields like investment banking, where you go to college may make a difference. On the other hand, it could be argued that graduates of top schools overly represent the top students applying for these positions. There also have been studies that have looked at career success of students who turned down ivy-league schools (I remember reading a Jay Mathews Washington Post article on this) for state schools and LACs, and they appear to do equally well later in life. If they were stars in h.s., they likely will be stars in their chosen career field regardless of where they went to college. They will maximize their college education wherever they go. The college does not make the man/woman. Mr. Kirn may be right if you want to impress people in a country club but I am not sure how well that holds in the real world. I would like to add that I have seen a number of Ivy-leaguers stuck at mid-level jobs. These people eventually reached their true potential (ivy league degree nothwithstanding) or they made personal choices on how important their career was vs. family/personal life. The latter factor I think is greatly overlooked, particularly for women, when trying to gauge what role education has played in their ultimate career success. I work at an university, and we are dealing with dropoff of female faculty and their disportionately low representation as the high faculty levels. But I don't want to get too off topic......</p>
<p>pmyen, interesting: "success = X + i(vy league prestige)... etc. Note that the second term on the right is the IMAGINARY part. (Apologies to all of you non-geeks out there).</p>
<p>A big name can open doors. I work in a field that is not my major, and when I was looking for jobs, the big name got me consideration that I would not otherwise have gotten. It also was what initially caught the eye of the head of the institute which gave me a nice summer research fellowship one year, when they first saw my application. I know it was, because I was cced on the email that he sent to the prospective supervisors of fellowship awardees in the institute, and from the wording it was clear that he considered the school that I came from to be a very important factor to consider.</p>
<p>Prestige is not the only thing. I wouldn't say it's the most important thing. It's still helpful, though. You can succeed without it (and you can crash and burn spectacularly with it), but that's true of all sorts of things that are still helpful.</p>
<p>I went to a job interview once at a fancy hotel only a few short miles from the university I graduated from. This public college (a UC) was at the time only 25 years old yet ranked in the top fifty in the nation. Yet, the interviewer acted like he had never heard of it. "Where? Is that a good school?". He would never have asked something like that if it had been a 100- or 200-, year old college. I am sure no Ivy leagues/HPYS graduate ever got asked such a question. Yet, I had this experience repeated several times in the last 20 years. This is what "prestige" counts for... so you don't have to explain how great your education is and can spend the time in the interview telling about how great you are.</p>