Brown only gives need based aid, there is no merit aid there
Think you meant āgrants.ā There is no merit aid.
I didnāt mean to suggest that the factors I listed were fully comprehensive or equal among all elite schools. I am interested to hear your view.
What factors do you attribute the disproportionate representation of elite school grads as Fortune 500 CEOs, at elite grad schools, at prestige employers, Fulbrights, Rhodes, in political roles, etc?
As someone else mentioned, perhaps it is not a result of the school that turned them out, but the kind of students that apply to these schools are driven. There was a study some years ago that showed just thisāeven if a student didnāt graduate from an elite college, the fact that they applied in the first place is what made them more likely to succeed.
Which also means that if someone is driven, decides to go elsewhere for a host of reasons, then their likelihood of future success could be just as high as someone that attended an elite school.
Check out the list of top producing schools for Fulbright Scholars. The usual suspects are in there, and so are schools like Rutgers, UMASS, ASU, Louisville, UMD, and Ohio State. There are bright students everywhere.
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How about the fact that they admit intelligent students mostly from wealthy, well connected families. Or put more simply, the characteristics of the admitted students are more important than anything that happens at the college itself.
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Or could it be that they admit intelligent students from around the world from greatly different social and economic backgrounds, surround they with great teachers, provide them up-to-date facilities, and challenge them to be the best they can be? Or put more simply, a great student in great surrounding is the best possible situation.
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For most, it is not an either-or for whether payoff is in financial or non-financial terms.
Most probably have some minimum financial payoff and some maximum cost that is acceptable. However, for various choices of colleges and majors, many may meet the minimum requirements of financial payoff and cost, so other aspects of payoff come into consideration.
Probably for most students from high income, high social capital (connections and the like) families (the typical forum demographic), the financial payoff and cost constraints are minimal, so any importance placed on financial versus any other kind of payoff is by choice. With such choice, some choose to emphasize financial payoff, while others choose to emphasize other kind of payoff.
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I agree that most families would have to operate under a set of contraints. I donāt think this thread is meant for those families without any financial contraints. A decision that satisfies all the contraints, however, isnāt necessarily the most āoptimalā. Moreover, whatās āoptimalā for one family may not be so āoptimalā for another. All students and their families have their own priorities. Even if the priorities of some of them are purely financial, the payoff is almost impossible to be quantified and generalized in a way that works for all of them.
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Perhaps it can be explained by looking at students other than those in these groups (URM, first-generation-to-college):
- Academic superstars: will do well at any suitable college.
- Other superstars (including top level athletes): will do well at any suitable college.
- Other āhookā students (legacy, development, faculty relation): have plenty of family money and/or connections that will be an advantage in post-graduation careers.
Another possible explanation is the socialization aspect: elite private colleges are places where the predominant social class is upper middle to upper class, and predominantly non-URM. Due to SES, racial, and ethnic segregation in much of the US, many first-generation-to-college and URM students may have previously had little socialization with the non-URM upper middle to upper class, so four years at an elite private college may provide āsocial trainingā for job interviews for upper middle to upper class jobs. Although (for example) state flagships are typically more diverse than most high schools, they are less likely to have as high (parental) SES level as elite private colleges.
I think this is mostly accurate, though I donāt know the percentage of international or underrepresented students, but it does remind me of a side issue that goes into my personal feelings about elite private vs. large public universities.
Providing high-quality education to a small number of people at great expense just isnāt much of a trick. Weāve been doing that as long as there have been royal tutors. Itās understandable that people with means will seek out this opportunity. In a market economy, which I support, this option should be available.
However, a much more interesting question is how to provide reasonably good education on such a scale that competent and informed people are a large part of the population and not an elite. When land grant institutions came into being, that was the goal (I assume the emphasis was agriculture, but it was a time of great innovation and paid off). At various times since, such as after the Sputnik launch, there has been a national push to do a lot more than simply find those of peak ability and cultivate them to the exclusion of others who in aggregate may provide greater intellectual horsepower (let alone being informed citizens capable of critical thinking, if thatās not too much to ask).
It doesnāt have to be either/or, and the US does a passable job of providing appropriate educational opportunities all the way down the the level of community colleges, which are great resources and one of the few true bargains in higher education. (Where we fail, itās at the K-12 level.) I think we could do a lot better though, but the elite institutions are largely irrelevant to this question. They do an excellent job already for those few who can go there.
I liken it to the difference between an expensive supercomputer and widely available mass-produced microcomputers. If the year was 1980 and you had unlimited budget, you could buy and maintain a Cray supercomputer and it would be vastly superior to any then-existing early microcomputer. But the big story was that computers had become so cheap that people of modest means could purchase one (and a few years on could figure out what it might be good for).
So when I look at large state universities with enormous lectures, grading and office hours by inexperienced TAs, multiple choice exams, possibly even some deferred maintenance to facilities in contrast to the best teachers, up-to-date facilities, and even a level of personal advice and coaching that a smaller school can provide, what I see is not inferiority but a scalable model.
We are simply never going to bring Ivy League quality education to more than a small number of students. Unless you believe that it is acceptable to exclude most people from the value of a higher education, the interesting problem at a societal level is scale, and that is not a problem seriously addressed by elite institutions.
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There is a lot of nuance and a lot of wishful thinking in this and similar threads. Some people seemed to have a deep-seated investment in the belief that the prestigious colleges add nothing except higher costs and others that they add everything. Guess what. Neither is true. The answer is it depends
For context, I went to three of the HYPSM and taught at one at the beginning of my career but still have an affiliation (usually teach a week a year). My son got an MBA and a tech MS at one of them much more recently. I co-founded a tech firm with a kid who had a good job at one of the tech majors and 4 Stanford degrees all prior to the age of 30 and I advise a number of startups. I worked on Wall Street, helped start a hedge fund and run a specialized consulting firm that advises executives in companies around the world. I have had Presidents of countries as well as CEOs call me out of the blue seeking advice. And, Iāve been involved in hiring decisions at all three firms.
First, a few people made the point that it is harder to get into elite schools than it is to graduate. Surely true. Whatās the admit rate to Harvard and whatās the 4 year or six-year graduation rate? I suspect that the same is true for University of Texas or University of Michigan or Rutgers, and in schools where it isnāt, I suspect that the problem may have a lot to do with the difficulties in paying as much as academic performance.
Unfortunately, the implication (sometimes made snidely) is that the coursework and/or competition were easy and that it was a piece of cake so therefore you shouldnāt assume they worked hard or learned much. [Without that implication, it is an interesting but irrelevant fact]. That implication is not consistent with my experience and observation, if only because at HYPSM your other classmates are so good. I recall taking an undergrad class in Linear Programming & Game Theory taught by an eminent professor. In the class were 5 students who had placed in the Math Olympiad. I had to work incredibly hard to do well in that class. I took a physics course for which the grading philosophy of the professor as quoted in the student guide to courses was āThis is not a course where I give a D student a C.ā I am skeptical that it would have been harder to pass or do well in the math, stats, econ or physics classes at UMass Amherst or U of Michigan or UCLA. My sonās experience at an LAC normally rated in the top 2 or 3 in the country is consistent with my experience ā he loved the school but his only criticism was that he found very few find classmates of his caliber. Limited external validation but he was the first summa in his advisorās 18 years of teaching and won a number of prizes for outstanding academic performance.
Second, people seem to go around and around on the question of whether good student outcomes derive from the student or the school. Yes, both are true. Reminds me of the old Certs commercial. More able people will do better than less able people regardless of where they go to school. And, especially for certain career paths as well as for minority populations or others not at the top of the economic or social elite, elite schools provide benefit above and beyond the individual studentsā capability/effort and parental resources while for others they donāt. Going to an elite school may in fact encourage/enable students to pick different career paths than they might have chosen at a school lower down on the elite list.
People have talked about the revered (by some on CC) industries of management consulting and i-banking, where elite school background has helped. A number of years ago, I helped start a hedge funds (though I was never active in running anything) with another guy with an elite-heavy resume. At the time, it was clear that at a number of firms, Ivy degrees were, if not a minimum requirement, a highly desired characteristic. If you didnāt get into that game early, you would be a lot less likely to get in the game later. My absolute best employee was a math/econ major at UMass Amherst ā and we had Princeton, MIT, Harvard kids. He left to become a portfolio manager at a bank ā which is a good job but he didnāt land at a hedge fund where he could have made gazillions. I think quant funds are less elite-sensitive, but even there, we got an offer to purchase our firm very early on from one of the very famous quant hedge funds largely because we were doing something interesting and their founder called my PhD advisor (whom he knew) to see if I was smart. I turned it down because I didnāt want to work in a quantitative hedge fund full-time.
Similarly, your opportunity to be part of startups while at school and to get funding is substantially higher at Stanford than at many other schools. And, again, once you are in that flow and are on your second or fourth startup, you will have lots more opportunities coming your way. I see earlier that people debate this, but the ecosystem surrounding Stanford for building and funding companies is an order of magnitude more effective than anything Iāve seen elsewhere. The advantage is diminishing with time and COVID.
In contrast, I donāt know if an Ivy nursing degree (undergrad nursing degree at Penn and maybe others) provides any benefit over other good schools in terms of career prospects or income. Do Ivy psych or English majors who go into teaching after an obligatory stint in TFA do better career-wise than teachers with lesser academic backgrounds? I donāt know. Iād guess instead that that the Ivy-educated are more likely to seek out other options and leave teaching (no data on this).
My experience is that elite schools offer three things that many others do not or offer to a lesser extent. They may or may not provide a better education than other schools and one can get a good education at many schools. They provide (or can provide):
ā¢ Bigger Horizons (You leave thinking you want to be the best in the world at what you do and realize thatās feasible versus the best in Canada or the best in Texas);
ā¢ Contacts (the alumni networks are very impressive as are your classmates), and
ā¢ A National and International Reputation ā they provide a great stamp on the forehead (the international recognition of Harvard is extraordinary) that arises in part because of their selectivity.
There are probably a few other specialized schools (e.g., Yale or RISD for art, Waterloo or CMU for computer science, etc.) that function the same way in their fields as I see in roughly the top 15. In their own areas, these specialized elite school probably function the same way (horizons, contacts and reputation).
Similarly, there are regional effects. If you want to work in Alabama, going to undergrad and law school in Alabama may actually help you more than going to Yale and Yale Law School.
I am not saying that people from a less elite school canāt become the best in the world at what they do (that would clearly be false) but I am saying that many grads of the elite schools I have been associated with more or less come to assume this or something similar as a goal.
Third, it is helpful to think about the opportunities in terms of conditional probabilities and about the fact that in oneās career, there are a number of opportunities whose for whom your probability of getting the opportunity is conditional on where you have gone to school to date and what you have done to date. In some fields like engineering, it seems like outside of places like MIT, Stanford and CMU, the probability is largely unconditional on school and more on experience. In those fields, the effects of education will quickly die out in explaining career success. In others like hedge funds or management consulting, relatively greater weight will be given to where you went to school. More importantly, the probabilities cascade. You get opportunities because of your background (as opposed to your work). Those opportunities make you look more attractive at the next stage. And you find yourself on a path you would have been much less likely to be on than if you had gone to a less elite school. One of my college classmates, very bright and very able, went to HBS and then McKinsey. Like many, he tired of the travel and took a job as head of strategy at one of his large publicly traded clients and then rose to be CEO. His undergraduate degree increased the probability of getting into HBS, which increased the probability of a McKinsey offer, which increased the probability of moving at a young-ish age to a senior position at a client. I have had an unconventional career (there were no firms doing what I do when I was in school) andI believe that at each stage the eliteness of my undergraduate school (combined with my performance) made it easier to get into a couple of highly prestigious grad schools, which increased the probability of getting hired at a prestigious business school in a field in which I had no training, which made it easier for me to get a job on Wall Street, all of which make it easier for me to get clients at my consulting firm. Iād say it made it easier to raise venture capital for my startup and definitely made it easier to raise capital for the hedge fund. I would also say that @ucbalumnusās suggestion about getting social training was valid in my case: I looked at my education explicitly as an opportunity to learn about how to walk in the pathways of power.
I donāt judge things solely in terms of income/wealth, but if you asked me whether the price differential between my elite school and U of Michigan Honors College (which was my safety school) had a good ROI, Iād say likely quite large. Hard to know what I would have done and I might have ended up exactly where I am, but Iād say unlikely.
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Someone has already thought of this.
ASU Charter, Mission and Goals | New American University.
ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom we exclude, but rather by whom we include and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves.
We are simply never going to bring Ivy League quality education to more than a small number of students.
Again, there is the thought to using Zoom or similar and pairing up prestigious schools with technology companies in order to scale the education. I remember reading about this at the beginning of the pandemic.
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I suspect it would help if their goal was to teach at a private prep school rather than a public school. (I have no data to back this up I admit.)
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āFor context, I went to three of the HYPSM and taught at one at the beginning of my career but still have an affiliationā¦.I worked on Wall Street, helped start a hedge fund and run a specialized consulting firm that advises executives in companies around the world. I have had Presidents of countries as well as CEOs call me out of the blue seeking advice.ā
SLACKERš
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Great post, and your stance on the āwhat ifā question is one I try to articulate ad nauseam. Where would my S be right now if he had chosen any other school than one he attended? I donāt know. What I do know is that he had opportunities at Stanford that continue to amaze me. And the compounding benefits are only beginning.
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Arizona State University is also fortunate enough to be located in a metro area that has a majority of its stateās population. This allows it to be commute-accessible to a large portion of the stateās population, so that the extra cost of residential living are less likely to be a barrier against attending (or an extra college / state financial aid expense for some students). Since it is very large, it does not need to be very selective, so it can fulfill a broad-access state university mission. In addition, it gets enough strong students (at least partly due to large size) so that it can also fulfill a flagship-level university mission at the same time.
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I agree that it all depends. But thereās a difference between those who only have an undergrad degree and those with further degrees. I think the value of getting your graduate degree from a name school is clear. So has your S really been disadvantaged by not attending HYPSM for undergrad? Is the ROI potentially better if you save your money in undergrad then go to Stanford or MIT for grad school? You mention a college classmate who went to HBS. How much did his undergrad college really boost his chance of getting in vs being a superstar somewhere else?
Amongst the MIT PhDs I know, I donāt see any difference in outcomes after they graduate based on where they went to undergrad, though they joke about one of them that āsheās the really smart one, she was an undergrad there tooā.
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Yes, thatās true. The same can be said though for both the University of Washington and Seattle, and Univ. of Minnesota and the Twin Cities, yet both schoolsā main campuses are much more selective than ASU. And itās in the schoolās mission. Iām sure others have something like it, but Iāve never seen it out of a major university.
University of Washington and University of Minnesota are probably too selective to be considered broad-access state universities.
In the Seattle area, the broad-access mission appears to be fulfilled by satellite campuses of other state universities. In the Minneapolis area, the broad-access mission appears to be fulfilled by Metropolitan State University.
Their situations are probably similar to UCLA, which is in a very large metro area of California and at least theoretically commutable by many students. However, it is too small* and therefore too selective to be a broad-access university; the broad-access universities in the area would be CSUDH, CSULA, etcā¦
University of Hawaii is probably most similar to Arizona State University in this respect of fulfilling both a flagship mission and a broad-access mission.
*Yes, UCLA is large, but not relative to population numbers in California.
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The University of Utah is pretty similar, also commute accessible in the major metropolitan area of the state and large enough to admit 80%+ of applicants.
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