<p>I posted this in the thread:</p>
<p><a href=“Prestige of undergraduate school? - Law School - College Confidential Forums”>Prestige of undergraduate school? - Law School - College Confidential Forums;
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<p>I went on a fairly expensive dude ranch holiday in Wyoming once. My fellow horsemen were a physician, a CEO of a Fortune-500 company, a bail bondsman, and the owner of 4 McDonald’s franchises (who had started as an hourly worker in McDonald’s).</p>
<p>Everyone could afford it - you do NOT need a lot of education to make a lot of money in America. You don’t need any college at all.</p>
<p>But money or not, the bail guy and the McDonald’s guy had a limited view on a lot of things. I think it would have benefited them to have picked up a strong liberal arts education along the way …</p>
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I think sometimes people are misled by the single-digit admit rates of prestigious colleges and forget just how few of the high schoolers are actually “following the crowd” (and even fewer of those that are “blindly” following). Considering many of this self selecting group of students are applying to multiple colleges of similar selectivity, they only represent a very small fraction of high school graduates each year. On the other hand, a state flagship could easily have applicants two times over any one of them. I actually see more kids and families “blindly” follow the majority and apply to state universities or local colleges only, believing it doesn’t make a difference where one goes to college. Is this “following” better than that “following”? I am not sure. I suppose at the end of the day, wherever you can get in, can afford, can get trained and prepared well for a career in the future, and can have a fulfilling college experience - in that order of importance - is the best college choice for you. </p>
<p>Polo’s sentiments are similar to mine… I’m not especially smart (probably 1 standard deviation above) and I went to a big public school, I make good money (very low 6 figures) in a relatively low cost of living area. People choose 150K (everything included) in Silicon valley with 60 hour weeks, fine, but I wouldn’t choose that over what I got. </p>
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Is this definition of “success” too ambitious and hard to achieve even for most premeds in Harvard?</p>
<p>I do not know about Harvard premeds. But I once heard that even among premeds from many ivy-level colleges, roughly 70% of medical school matriculants attend their in-state public medical schools. But it is also quite possible that they are into the specialties like cardiovascular surgery or dermatology, or becoming Chief of Neurology at a major teaching hospital, as many would claim it does not matter what med school a person attends. This may be true, but I also heard that a dermatology residency program may take a couple of residents only, unlike a IM or primary care program which often takes an order of magnitude more residents (say, 30 or 40 vs 3 or 4.) Very few become dermatologists in the end no matter what med school they attend. Is the class size of HMS like 160 or so? Is this number in the same order as the number of residents a year in all dermatology programs in the whole country?</p>
<p>I had two Yale premeds as roommates during college. The first defined success as a Nobel Prize, no kidding, although by the end of our freshman year he had announced, sadly, that he had decided he was one quantum of intelligence short of an actual Nobelist, and that he would probably never achieve his dream. (He got an MD/PhD at a leading medical school, and is the long-time chair of Oncology at a world-class teaching hospital.) The second was not quite as specific, but he was really no less ambitious, and very interested in issues of poverty and access to medical care. He is the medical outcomes researcher I described a few pages back, and Chief Quality Officer at a different world-class teaching hospital.</p>
<p>There were other premeds at Yale, of course, who just wanted to get medical degrees and to be doctors somewhere. Many of them did go to public medical schools in their home states. I would say that the pre-meds I knew were probably split more or less evenly among this group, people with outsized ambitions like my roommates, and people who were not as interested in high-level academics but who had a very missionary/service approach to medicine, whose goals were to run clinics on Indian reservations, or in Haiti.</p>
<p>Most of the pre-meds I knew had pretty modest ambitions. The one majoring in economics was thinking about doing something with public health, but ended up becoming a radiologist. Another is a rheumatologist. The one who is best known is a pediatrician, and has published both fiction and nonfiction.</p>
<p>I’ve been fortunate to get my education at some world-class schools and alas, we are not rolling in the dough either. </p>
<p>But I do feel like I was unrealistically idealistic back when I was seventeen about what it would mean to attend a top class university and ‘succeed’. What I now know is that whether or not you attend a golden ticket school, it’s not actually going to shield you from the risks that we all face as humans – corny as that sounds. In our college alumni magazine, they ran a really interesting series of profiles awhile ago, after asking alumni who DIDN’T have the sorts of lives which were usually featured in the magazine to go ahead and write in. They featured a woman who had recently been released from rehab for a drug addiction, another woman who went to prison for embezzlement, someone who had recently left an abusive marriage, someone who had lost a child – A lot of these women said that they weren’t your traditional successful alum, but that nonetheless they had acquired certain types of skills and strength of character that had enabled them to learn from these painful experiences. They were all really bright and articulate as well. Going to a ‘good school’ won’t keep you from being widowed, being killed by a drunk driver, facing the risks of something like suicide – but it might help you weather it better. Perhaps.</p>
<p>Clearly not everyone who graduates from an Ivy League school ends up owning a yacht or a mansion – but that doesn’t actually mean that getting a good education is a waste of time. However, if any parent thinks “Oh, hooray. Junior just got into Yale so now I don’t have to worry about him anymore - he’s on the road to success,” it appears that, alas, that is also an unrealistically rosy way of looking at the situation.</p>
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<p>Neither position would leave much time for anything but career aspirations. IMO…neither are successful.</p>