<p>I was a Cornell grad … and my closest friends turned out to be …</p>
<ul>
<li>Corporate Middle Manager (me)</li>
<li>Corporate Middle Manager</li>
<li>Stay-at-home Mom who happens to fly C141s in the war for the Air Force Reserve as a part-time job</li>
<li>A University Prof and published poet</li>
<li>An Olympian runner and running coach (teammate but not really close friend)</li>
<li>A Corporate Lawyer</li>
<li>A Hollywood big-shot</li>
<li>A ski bum … and then programmer (and still basically a ski bum)</li>
<li>A family doctor</li>
<li>A doctor (no idea of her specialty)</li>
<li>A professor studying bugs</li>
<li>A lawyer (no idea about his focus)</li>
<li>A stay-at-home Mom</li>
<li>A corporate research scientist</li>
<li>A restaurant owner</li>
<li>A hotel chain manager</li>
</ul>
<p>As far as I know interesting people for the most part happy with where there life took them … across a wide range of interests.</p>
<p>However if I did the same for my B-school (MIT Sloan) classmates the listing would probably look a lot more like what the OP was expecting … lots of wall street, high powered consulting, and start-up business types … I would guess a much higher average and median incomes than my undergrad friends … although I have to add I found my undergrad friends to be a much more interesting and eclectic bunch.</p>
<p>Just in my family (including aunts, uncles, 1st cousins and their kids) there are 3 Stanford grads, 5 Yale undergrads and two Yale Law grads (we’re from New Haven, so) 1 Harvard law grad, 3 Smithies (before HYP went co-ed.) They all have been very successful in their chosen fields and some make/made a lots of money and others not so much and it pretty much depended on what they chose to do after graduating. One of the Stanford grads (PHD in Busiiness from USC or UCLA) started a firm which offers expert testimony (like when Microsoft gets sued, for eg) and makes lots of money, while his sister started a non profit in Austin which arranges for medical insurance coverage for musicians. She is very successful and has been named Business Woman of the Year in Austin, but certainly does not make a lot of money. One Yale grad went into publishing and is an editor. Not very lucrative, but it’s what she wanted to do. She also wrote a crappy chic lit book that got published. I probably bought the only copy sold. The Harvard Law grad (Yale undergrad) hated law so much he never practiced a day and went back to grad school and became a psychologist. </p>
<p>Not counting what people have inherited and/or made from investments the two most successful (in terms of salary) are my cousin and her husband who are Syracuse graduates with no advanced degrees. They both got their first jobs through connections, one as a receptionist at a clothing manufacturer’s show room on 6th Avenue and the other at a multinational car rental agency where he started out as a lowly assistant manager. 30 years later, still at their respective companies, she is President of the clothing manufacture and he is Sr. VP of domestic operations and has 13,000 people working for him. Both make well north of $1M a year. Neither of them got business degrees as undergrads or anything remotely related to business, and he barely managed to graduate as he is dyslexic but it went undiagnosed - which was not uncommon in the 60’s-70’s when he was a kid. We all thought he was just stupid. Their son, who shockingly also went undiagnosed for LD until college at URI (which he barely got into) graduated two years ago at the height of the recession, took himself to NYC and knocked on doors (literally) until he landed a job selling time for the Baptist Channel (or the Gospel Channel or something like that.) He is now doing well enough that his parents no longer have to supplement his NYC rent. Now, I have no idea if he’ll ever make anywhere close to what his parents do but, imo, the moral of the story is, if one is willing to start out at the bottom and works hard one can become successful no matter where you graduate from or how you start out. I think the problem today is to many kids after graduation want instant gratification ($$$) and want top jobs and salaries from the get go and miss the big picture (slow and steady can also win the race.) </p>
<p>Then there is my ex bil who graduated from Brooklyn College and got his CPA and then went on to become CFO at a number of Wall St. firms. My sister did really well after the divorce. ;)</p>
<p>Major matters a lot. A school heavy with engineering majors will tend to have a higher average pay of graduates than a similarly selective school full of biology and humanities majors.</p>
<p>I know a doctor who graduated from Harvard’s graduate school… probably about ~15 years ago. She’s old now, settled down, and works as a doctor. She spends a lot of her time volunteering actually, especially for kids in the PH recently with the floods and all. Last I heard she makes about $100k+ more or less per year.</p>
<p>I know a communications major who went to Syracuse (mentioning this because someone mentioned that majors are vital to the school, if the school has a strong program). As you probably know, Syracuse has a very strong communications program. Yeah, this person now makes about $80k/yr. He graduated in the early 90’s.</p>
<p>In a similar vein, my sister in law says, “We’re rich…we just don’t have a lot of money.” Drives her kids nuts, LOL. I think they would like a little more money…</p>
<p>There are some on CC who went to super selective colleges. It is likely that those people went to school with others who come from BIG family money. So I’m sure that CC members know some of the uber-rich.</p>
<p>I know lots of HYPS grads. In my line of work they’re pretty much a dime a dozen, and they don’t make any more than anyone else but they make enough to be comfortably upper middle class.</p>
<p>Probably the richest person I know personally is a Stanford dropout who made and lost millions in the dot.com boom and bust, then made millions more on another start-up tech business. He certainly wouldn’t attribute his technical or business acumen to anything Stanford taught him, though I suppose the school did play some kind of role in drawing him to the location and networks where he was able to thrive. On the other hand my nephew has followed a pretty similar career trajectory (not the same degree of financial success, but nonetheless doing quite well and ever-convinced he’s just on the verge of the “next big thing”) as a Purdue dropout who decided it was more important to situate himself in Silicon Valley than to finish his undergrad degree. He says in SV it’s all about what you know, what you can do, what are your ideas and what are they worth, and serendipity, being in the right place at the right time with the right idea and the right group of people and financial backers to make something happen; the academic pedigree is pretty much irrelevant in that high-flying, risk-taking entrepreneurial environment.</p>
<p>Most of the HYPS grads I know are not such risk-takers; for the most part they’ve ended up in conventional careers as doctors, lawyers, academics, and business executives. On the whole I’d say they’re financially successful, but neither more so nor less so than the people I knew as an undergrad in the University of Michigan honors program, who have followed very similar career trajectories.</p>
<p>If you want the one area where going to HYPS (or one of the handful of equivalent schools) makes a real difference, this is it: Major hardly matters at all. Maybe it’s changing now, but from everything I know employers and graduate schools will accept that a student is really smart and has something to offer without regard to major. I know recent History, Sociology, and Anthropology majors with the kinds of consulting or tech jobs the most mercenary of students covet, and for which most of the world assumes a math, economics, or technical major is necessary. My sister has had a great career in the investment world on the strength of her Stanford Spanish Lit major, my wife’s career began with a job in low-income housing development that had nothing to do with her American Studies/Psychology double major, and I graduated with offers on Wall Street notwithstanding my completely wifty Comp Lit major.</p>
<p>Two of the most successful people I know are graduates of public southern schools (undergrad and grad). Another person, a graduate of two HYPS schools, isn’t doing anywhere as well as the public school grads. The responses here are going to be pretty idiosyncratic.</p>
<p>I see two of them every time I look in the mirror. But, no, they’re not remotely wealthy, separately or together. I do suspect that most of their former classmates have been much more successful financially. At least judging by the class notes in the alumni magazines. Not that those are exactly a representative sample! And not that I would put that kind of success very high at all on my list of what I consider important.</p>
<p>What’s your angle here, @bingotingo? If you want to know, really, what happens to Ivy League graduates when they grow up, you certainly could have concluded, reading this thread, that it’s rather difficult to generalize. If you want “scientific” information, Google research studies on the subject.</p>