<p>But how many colleges send nearly half their graduates who enter the workforce into management consulting and finance jobs? Very few, I think. So, with respect to the original topic, it’s appropriate to distinguish the perception of prestige among students preparing for these niche sectors from the perceptions of average college-educated people.</p>
<p>Your average state university does send many graduates into IT careers. However, this rarely means a career with Google, Facebook, or Microsoft Research. In my area, it might mean a software engineering job with Bechtel, SAIC, or Lockheed Martin. Companies like this will hire graduates, at decent starting salaries, straight out of the University of Maryland. Not necessarily College Park, either, but also “directional” schools like UMBC. These are opportunities that did not exist 50 years ago.</p>
<p>I would argue the opposite: the original topic is precisely what gives the notion of prestige such salience. I agree with you: only a tiny handful of colleges send even a small fraction of their graduates to management consulting, finance, or other high-end careers. But that’s the point. We’re not talking about the opportunities available to the students at the thousands of regular colleges. We’re talking about the opportunities available to the twenty most prestigious colleges. </p>
<p>Let’s be perfectly honest. Most college students would like the opportunities for high-end jobs. They would like the opportunity to be management consultants. They would like the opportunity to be investment bankers and pocket record bonuses despite 12-figure government taxpayer double-digit unemployment. {They may deeply resent the captured political system that disgorges such largesse, but they should candidly admit that they would like to feast on that gravy train themselves. Anybody who doesn’t want easy unearned money can simply hand it to me.} Most would like opportunities work for sexy tech firms such as Facebook, Google, or Apple. Even if they never do work for such firms, they would like the opportunities to do so. For example, maybe I wouldn’t actually want to date Megan Fox, but I would surely like to have the opportunity. </p>
<p>Prestigious schools are prestigious because people believe that those schools provide better career opportunities - either through better recruiting, networking, or purely through a superior education - than regular schools do. Note, that’s not to say that those schools actually provide better opportunities. Rather, people believe that they do. If nobody thought that Harvard provided any career advantages, then people would not consider Harvard to be prestigious. </p>
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<p>Whether those jobs would have even existed at all had it not been for the mass popularization of college education in the last 50 years is an interesting counterfactual question. It should be pointed out that both Facebook and Microsoft were founded by entrepreneurs who never even graduated from college at all. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, many - probably most - IT jobs would be filled even without the mass popularization of college education. They would simply be filled using different criteria - and such criteria already exist through vendor certification programs. You can obtain a quite lucrative and cushy IT job right now without ever having gone to college at all, or in some cases by not having even graduated from high school, by just earning IT vendor certifications in Cisco, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Red Hat, or other technologies. {For that reason, I think that many college students would be better off not even going to college at all but instead earning various IT certifications. A dedicated and reasonably intelligent teenager could probably earn the Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert certification after one summer’s worth of diligent studying and practice.} What college degrees do then is to provide a screening process by which employers can implement their hiring schemes, where the costs of the screen are outsourced to the employees. In other words, people feel compelled to earn college degrees simply because so many other people also have college degrees and so if they don’t, they will look bad by comparison. Without college degrees, employers would be forced to invoke cheaper and arguably more relevant screens, such as certifications.</p>
<p>I find it interesting that you say that people would associate Stanford with football: yet you rank Notre Dame above Stanford. If there is any school that should be associated with football, it has to be the Fighting Irish. The most consensus national championships of any school, the most All-Americans, the most Heisman Trophies, most members of the College Football Hall of Fame, most players to ever be sent to the NFL, need I go on?</p>
<p>I must agree sakky. Stanford is not associated with football. It may be with athletics and Tiger Woods. Hell, even the Marching Band is famous/notorious. But people think Stanford, they seldom think of football.</p>
<p>Caltech and MIT are expected to perform less on this area as they are, by and large, engineering schools, and engineering is a tough program wherever it is offered. Excellent engineering teachers can teach engineering the most artistic and simple way they can, but at the end of the day, the approach won’t be as simple as compared to the way how humanities, social science and languages subjects are done. At the end of the day, the heavy content and the very high level of difficulty of the subject or program will lead the teaching style less effective. This is even true at LACs where teaching is supposed to be the “bread and butter” of their existence in academia.</p>
<p>Calculated through the deeply questionable methodology of asking academics about the quality of the teaching at other institutions. It may be acceptable to ask other academics about the quality of the research at other schools, for that is what they spend most of their time performing themselves. But to ask academics about teaching is an entirely different story. </p>
<p>But none of that is an acceptable excuse. As an engineering student, you just want to be well taught. If you’re not - and as you have correctly pointed out, you probably won’t be - you won’t care why. All you’ll care about is that you’re not being taught well.</p>
<p>Yes, although I was referring to software engineering jobs that really do seem to benefit from college educated employees (people who can not only write code, but also understand and discuss the ins and outs of customer requirements, analyze alternative approaches, put together flashy presentations supported by reliable metrics, and think outside the box of vendor-proprietary solutions.)</p>
<p>My home is in a rural area on the edge of the east coast urban corridor.
The population is a mix of relative newcomers with long commutes and farm families that have been here for generations. I think high school students here are more or less vaguely aware of a bigger world of prestigious schools and other opportunities, but I doubt very many of them dream of jobs as management consultants and investment bankers. Those careers would not reflect the tastes and interests typical of people in this area. A Cornell ornithologist probably would command more interest and respect here than a Wharton financier.</p>
<p>Stanford…ex-Michigan QB Jim Harbaugh is the coach…their football team is on TV across the nation a lot, often roughing up Notre Dame, USC, etc. Sakky and Alexandre, you are apparently too young to remember the days when Jim Plunkett and the Stanford Indians were a thorn in the Big 10’s side. Sakky, have you been living under a rock? There are lots of Notre Dame fans everywhere, and most of them are aware that it’s good academically. The same can’t be said for Stanford. A couple weeks ago I was in a hole-in-the-wall bar in North Adams, Massachusetts. There were literally 3 other customers in there, and one of them was wearing a Notre Dame hat. Go in just about any bar in the country outside the Southeast, and you’ll see a Notre Dame hat/sweatshirt/tshirt.</p>
<p>Stanford’s president, Gerhard Casper thought pretty highly of Cal and Michigan. They are the “prima vacie” evidence he used in his now famous letter to the editor of the USNWR of why he believes their ranking is flawed. </p>
<p>As for Michiganders who attended Stanford, there are many. Right of the top of my head, I can think of three very famous ones who have done ok for themselves in California. </p>
<ul>
<li>Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems)</li>
<li>Larry Page (c-founder of Google)</li>
<li>William Hewlett (co-founder of Hewlett Packard) </li>
</ul>
<p>All three were all raised in Michigan. Two of them attended Stanford (Hewlett for undergrad and Page for grad) and two of them attended Michigan (Page and Joy for undergrad). Many other men and women who have played a significant role in shaping Silicon Valley have come from Michigan.</p>
<p>@rjkofnovi: I think most lay people across the entire U.S. (except in the regions where these schools are located) don’t realize that WUSTL, Rice, Emory, Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, Pomona, Claremont McKenna, and Middlebury offer as great of an education in many fields as their more prestigious counterparts (and in some instances, a better education in certain fields).</p>
<p>As a Michigan resident, I do not know one person who has not heard of Stanford, all I know sees it as one of the worlds most notable universities.</p>
<p>I agree Coolbrezze, Stanford, along with HYP and MIT is one of America’s 5 universities that has a strong national (and international) reputation. Cal and Columbia come close too.</p>
<p>“all I know sees it as one of the worlds most notable universities.” </p>
<p>I hope all you know use better grammar and punctuation than you do. Usually I don’t get picky about such things, but if you’re trying to convince me that you live in Michigan and everybody in your social circle knows Stanford intimately, I think I have the right to expect you to write at at least the 8th-grade level.</p>
<p>I just got back from Avatar. I found it adorably desperate that the chief of the project was cast wearing a Stanford t-shirt throughout the movie. Stanford does not have nearly as much lay prestige as Harvard does, nor does is it close to matching Yale in lay prestige. It can’t even touch Berkeley.</p>