I interpreted that statement as saying: “Here’s a simplistic, incomplete, yet interesting definition of value, and these are the rankings that definition produces, as nearly as we can calculate them.”
The Economist rankings are ridiculous if you take them as suggesting seriously that Otis School of Art has value equivalent to Harvard, and much more than Yale. But they’re not ridiculous at all in suggesting that Otis School of Art is doing something worth paying attention to, and maybe trying to reproduce elsewhere. And if you were a budding artist trying to figure out how to turn your passion into a livelihood, this would be valuable information.
It’s a good idea in theory, but they are missing some key factors that explain many of the higher ranked colleges. For example, 49% of the Harvard sample group was age 24 or greater at “entry”. I suppose it’s mostly persons whose generous school grants ran out after the their 4th year (including those pursuing joint bachelors/grad degrees) and are looking for loans to get through their final year. This has implications when looking at income a specific number of years after FA, particularly in fields where salary increases rapidly after completing first few years/residency/… So it’s not a surprise that Harvard does quite well when comparing to similar colleges, which almost all have a notably younger sample group.
^Or maybe the age of Harvard students reflects the fact that their acceptance letter strongly suggests taking a gap year. Many possibilities!
I think of H and Y as being very similar, but I think they may well have become more different over the years. The only recent grad I know from Yale is tutoring in Harlem and trying to make a go with his rock band. All his friends think eventually he’ll settle down and teach high school history. He certainly fits the pattern!
The Harvard group’s median (government FA/loan) entry age was 23.65 with 49% age 24 or greater. Other similar highly selective colleges were usually quite a bit lower. For example, Swarthmore had a median age of 19.29 with 0% age 24 or greater. A difference of 4.36 years cannot be explained by a single gap year.
The gap year wouldn’t explain being age 24 at first application for federal financial aid. But maybe being ex-military or ex-Mormon mission would (in addition to @Data10 's hypothesis). Also, the fact that 49% of the Harvard sample first applied for federal financial aid at age 24 – and thus had their earnings measured at age 34, not 28 – really brings home @PurpleTitan 's point that the sample size for the elite colleges that don’t rely on federal financial aid may be really, really small, and not representative at all of the college population as a whole.
I am confused by another thing, too. The list of factors listed above that were taken into account in developing predicted earnings for each college does not include family income of applicants, which the article in The Economist emphasizes as a major determinant of future earnings. That certainly gave me the impression that it was taken into account in the study. Or was the idea that all applicants for federal financial assistance were poor enough so that differences in their family incomes didn’t matter?
I don’t think the wealth of the college’s city or the prevailing wage in its state should be part of the calculations for colleges whose graduates tend not to remain in the immediate area after graduation. The Ivy League and leading LACs draw students from across the world. After graduation, the students disperse.
The prevailing wage for college graduates in an average of New York, D.C., Chicago, Boston, and Silicon Valley might be a better measure–weighted more heavily toward the last for the colleges with many tech graduates.
Such a kid could make the campus life at college more “interesting” than a kid who thinks of nothing but the lucrative intern opportunity in the finance industry all 4 UG years. Isn’t this what some elite colleges look for in their admitted students these days?
In addition to this “ill-placed passion (for financial gain)” factor, there could be another factor that influences the potential earning outcome: family connections.
How can you measure this?! Maybe try to find out what EC activities the students from more connected families may participate in high school? Parents’ income? The industry which their close relatives (esp. parents) and circle of friends are in?
“The Ivy League and leading LACs draw students from across the world. After graduation, the students disperse.”
Well, not really. All the elite schools (whether u or LAC) strongly over index to their home region - the two exceptions being Duke and Oberlin if I recall the data properly. Of course they will be more national in scope than your typical state u or “lower” private - but folks on CC tend to greatly exaggerate the nationalness of the draw. All of these schools still have most presence in home region - particularly the NE LACs. Bclintonk and I tumbled these numbers some time ago.
“Such a kid could make the campus life at college more “interesting” than a kid who thinks of nothing but the lucrative intern opportunity in the finance industry all 4 UG years”
AMEN.
"In addition to this “ill-placed passion (for financial gain)” factor, there could be another factor that influences the potential earning outcome: family connections.
How can you measure this?! Maybe try to find out what EC activities the students from more connected families may participate in high school? Parents’ income? The industry which their close relatives (esp. parents) and circle of friends are in?"
IMO, connections are made through people, not industries. I leveraged connections for my kids but that had nothing to do with my specific industry (or my spouse’s). Of course, by leverage I mean “put in a good word for” not “hire as a favor.”
Just a speculation here: The students from other countries who end up attending some of these elite colleges have a higher variation among themselves in terms of their personal ability and family resourcefulness. After all, these students grow up from a different environment. The bar is set higher before they could be admitted and go to these elite colleges.
Recently, I met a coworker who originally immigrated (12 years ago) from the country where DS’s girlfriend was born. He told me that when he was back in that country, any family like his would be unable to send their children to such a private elementary/middle/high school (for example, one of the admission criteria to such a secondary school is that the students had to be citizens of English speaking countries like US, Canada, etc. By and large it is such “special” schools, not their more typical high schools, which send their graduates to our elite colleges year after year.)
There’s some survey data about the recent graduates’ starting salaries that might be relevant to the discussion. The survey data obviously were solicited from all graduates instead of those who applied/received federal aid only. Note that the data shouldn’t be taken “literally” because of the way it’s collected.
It looks like Yale does “lose” to Harvard in the number of new graduates earning high salaries. According to the surveys, about 25% of H and 20% of Y graduates earn $70K-90K, and about 11% of H graduates and 8% of Y graduates earn $90K plus.
Absolutely I think my son’s Yalie friend is a great kid and I’d like to see more kids like him also choose Harvard. (He was actually a double legacy at Harvard.) It distresses me that Harvard seems to have been taken over by the IB crowd. It wasn’t like that when I was there. I completely agree with Helen Vendler that they should work harder at admitting the poets and painters too. http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/11/writers-and-artists-at-harvard
I have zippo interest in measuring colleges by future salaries. As long as kids graduate capable of being employed I’m okay.
If you include not only IB but also consulting/professional schools like medicine/law/etc., you probably could say the same for ANY elite colleges in CC’s standard.
I like one of the posts above: Training a student for academia? Horror!
The main benefit of going to an academically strong/research heavy university is that you do not have to further your education after 4 years in college. Borrowing a term, being “grade efficient”, that is popular in the premed world: You have to be efficient about how to do education right (i.e., invest your time wisely and do not “over-study it”) and get out of this system in as few years as you can. This is modern days’s gold standard of “do the education right.” /Sarcastic.
Sometimes I think that one reason why these elite colleges keep sending almost 40% of their students to these fields is that there is a mismatch between what the (arguably short-sighted) corporate world wants and what these colleges (especially the elite ones) provide.
The elite colleges, unlike other colleges, continue to believe (right or wrong) that the librral art education is still the core of the education that the students need, but the main stream corporate wants someone who do not need much training before they contribute snd it is not willing to train their new hires. Only some companies in the fields like IB/consulting think they could provide short training to these elite college graduates and make good use of them. In other word, only the companies in these selective few industries think that the “personal quality” (like capable of working very hard) of these students could be of value to them. In other word, these companies buy into the “innate personal quality” of the syudents per se, rather than what these colleges have educated them.
If this is indeed the problem, I think the problem is more on the corporate side, rather than on the college side, I think.
Look at the third tier colleges: They all train their students in the “hit-the-ground-and-run”, very practical majors (at least from what we can tell from the names of their majors.) The corporate world does not welcome the majority of them warmly either.
One of our interns last summer who is in a CSU now. From the number and course names that he is taking this year, you would think his course load is twice as heavy as an ivy kid. Everything he learns seems to be skin deep, I am afraid. (Not really knowing C language much and still claiming he is taking Linux kernel programming course and not knowing hiw to use almost any chips also?)
Mcat- consumer products companies, ad agencies, insurance companies, media companies, pharmaceutical companies- they all still hire kids who need to be trained. And they spend millions to do it.
It’s not just the “working real hard” they are buying. They are buying an ability to teach yourself something new quickly, an ability to relate a body of knowledge from one arena to another, and put very crudely, the ability to read a 500 page analysis of something going on at the company and create a 10 page “executive summary” out of it. SOME graduates of the elite schools- regardless of their major- do this very, very well. And in many companies, the ability to figure out, to synthesize, to analyze the RIGHT inputs and reject the wrong ones trumps content knowledge.
Do I need a kid who knows the history of the credit and banking industry in XYZ company in Europe and why that impacts mortgage pay-off rates in a particular country? Or do I need a kid with a degree in comparative political philosophy or history who can read a document about the credit and banking industries in Europe and connect the dots on why that’s relevant today?
I’ve interviewed kids with the narrow “international business” degrees (undergrad) and they struggle with basic concepts- why China is different from Brazil on a particular dimension. They try to deflect a question with " I didn’t focus on Asia". Which is fine. But if you don’t know who Mao was I would posit you have very limited opportunities in International Business.
I don’t think the corporations see a problem where you do. You’d see retention rates in the high single digits for large corporations in their managerial ranks if their college recruitment efforts were as abysmal as you describe.
You run a large media conglomerate. You have sports channels, you have cable political channels, you have mainstream entertainment channels, you own websites and interactive entertainment properties, and a couple of studios which make content both for your own distribution and through other people’s channels. How many kids who major in sports management can you hire in any given year- even if your marquee property is a sports channel? You need people who learn how to price and sell media time regardless of the content area. You need investor relations people who can analyze reams of data and turn it into a message which your CFO can credibly relate to the activist hedge fund which owns a significant percentage of your stock. You need creatives of all stripes. You need HR people who can figure out why your retiree benefit costs went up when your retiree cohort went down last year.
Etc. You need to hire young people who can think and calculate and create and analyze AND can learn new stuff- really, really quickly.
Yale SOMs motto is “trading leaders for business and Society.” They take the society portion very seriously as evidenced by the large number of Its grads that run non-profits and mission driven organizations.
You can download the data directly from the website if you want to take a look at it. I can tell you that there is absolutely no way there is any statistical significance to anything they say in that article given a quick peek at the underlying data. The data set is frankly incomplete.
IB (and to a lesser degree, management consulting) has been luring top students from Ivies and other top colleges with high pay and allegedly door opening opportunities. I know some students are taking the 2-3 tenure at a bank as a training camp to gain “shortcuts” to more promising career paths. Regardless, I think it’s fair to say that most of those who choose IB are more money driven in the short run and some of them are more ambitious in the long run. IMHO, IB and the like are carrying an unfair bad name around here. While it’s admirable to go for non-profit or low paying government jobs freshly out of college, it is not necessarily the only path to benefit the society, another being to be gainfully employed and use the wealth one could accumulate for greater causes in the future. There have been many philanthropists and those who otherwise benefit their communities and the society who started with “money making businesses”. If you look at the tuition cost of these schools, and consider what a stretch it could be to middle/upper middle class families who are full paying or receiving limited financial aid, it makes sense for the student to try to be gainfully employed first so as to pay down any student loans they might have to take, help with a sibling’s tuition bills or even inject a little to parents’ retirement accounts that have been dried up.
@blossom made some good points on what IB/consulting firms are looking for in the elite school graduates. However, more and more often nowadays, banks also look for practical skills, which then become the burden of the students who need to seek out electives of practical use or pick up those skills on their own. They need to work incredibly hard to be competitive for those jobs. Let’s just say the four years of college are less fun if you have IB on your mind (and the same can be said about medical school dreamers I guess). Which leads to a speculation about why there are more H graduates than Y graduates going for IB. Apparently, Y students have “more life” on campus than H students. If that’s true, then on the one hand, this means there are more “distractions” to Yalies to stay focused and get better prepared for those jobs, and on the other, they might be “spoiled” by the more intellectual experience on campus and tend to feel the grueling IB analyst job intolerable and a waste of life.
I think DS could possibly relate to this. Fortunately, he was not that much of a dreamer and so I think he was still relatively pleased with his 4 years of college life. He did complain loudly in the second half of his first year and swore that the extent he was willing to go was just to complete the required courses and nothing else, but he did “give in” in the last two years to complete a part of the mandatory “checklist” items so that it would not look “too bad” (still involved much fewer activities “for the show” than most of his peers did though. Some CCer thought his “other” quality luckily helped him overcome his weakness here.)
As regard to IB/consulting, he once said that he could make it if he tried , but knowing who he is, I really do not think so IMHO. (It takes a certain personality to do that line of job, it is not for him.)
