Ding, ding, ding. If prestige does not matter, then all of the lower cost of attendance schools/programs should be overflowing with all the best and brightest. The fact that the best and brightest typically seek out certain schools should give us pause. Could it be that some “prestigious” schools actually have some “prestigious” programs to offer? Could be? Maybe? If that’s the case could those same schools offer “prestigious” programs to undergrads or is there some invisible internal mechanism where only graduate students benefit?
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I’m curious. Is that 8.38% return each year annualized? If so, that’s fantastic.
If I had $100K, where can I get this kind of return?
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Get a great wealth manager. 
Bernie Madoff passed away this year, are there any others you can recommend? 
The DJIA has had a 9.4% annualized return over the last 40 years.
"Past performance is no guarantee of future results "
The average (future) nominal rate of return assumed by public pension schemes is still 7.2% (4.5% real), despite their supposedly diversified portfolios (ie not all equity). Unfortunately taxpayers are on the hook to bail them out if that isn’t achieved.
Exactly! It’s scarier world out there today than it was back 40 years ago.
However, I’m thinking now of telling my D21 that we could just put her public school tuition of roughly $100,000 into the DJIA and she’ll have $2.5 Million in 40 years. Of course $2.5 Million won’t be worth as much in the Year 2061.
It will be approximately the cost of attending an elite private college😀
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@Twoin18 , just returning to your question. I think you may be missing a step in assuming that whether the person would have gotten into MIT or Stanford for grad school was independent of where he/she went to college. Again, I like to think about conditional probabilities. Would the probability of admission change depending upon your undergraduate school (and advisor)?
In my case, my undergraduate advisor was a great man of academia. Beyond brilliant, a polymath, but not a great communicator (hence he had very few undergraduate advisees but I pursued him). I took on a project for him that others had started but completed. I finished it. I later learned from one of his coauthors that he thought I got better results than he thought were possible. I published it as solo as an article in the main journal in our field and I think it is still considered seminal in its area. My record at my undergraduate institution and his recommendation got me full fellowships (no teaching or research assistantships) at every school to which I applied (all of the best schools in the field). Would I have gotten in everywhere if I had gone to Michigan Honors College or Rutgers? I don’t know. I’m not so confident. And, when I decided I wanted to switch from one school to another, would that have happened in a heartbeat like it did with again a full fellowship? I don’t know.
When I arrived at grad school 2, my undergrad advisor’s coauthor said to me, “We normally need to work with grad students to teach them how to do research and see if they can do it. In your case, your undergraduate thesis would have been the best PhD thesis in our department for the last 10 years.” And basically, they let me take any courses I wanted all over the university. As I started to carve a very unconventional path, he said, “Just figure out what you want to do and do it.” All that could have happened, but I am not confident that being an equally smart/hard-working kid at a merely very good school would have gotten me the opportunities that I had in grad school.
Interestingly, I was shown my undergraduate advisor’s very short one paragraph reference for my post-doc, which said something like “He has some talent.” I think it mentioned that I got better results than he thought were possible. I was actually a little disappointed in the terse rec as I had worked my butt off for two years and produced work I was really proud of. It turned out “He has some talent” was understood as blazingly positive and helped me get my post-doc and assistant professorship.
That’s one data point and I could have had an equally famous advisor at Michigan (though I don’t think there was such a person in my field at Michigan) and I don’t think there would have been a comparable situation at Rutgers (to take the two universities I used as comparisons).
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Tuitions have been rising at more than twice the rate of general inflation in the last 30-40 years. If the cost of a college education is $300k today, a family has to invest the same $300k to generate an amount that’s sufficient to pay for a college education at any time in the future if, and only if, the annualized return equal to at least twice the inflation rate. There would be plenty of risk in such an investment (the risk-free rate over a 30-year horizon is only about 2% currently).
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I thought one paragraph terse recommendations were the best sort, viz John Nash’s recommendation letter This is the best letter of recommendation ever - Vox
I don’t doubt that a really positive letter from someone famously brilliant in your field helps enormously (for example in her book Educated, Tara Westover attributes winning her Gates Scholarship to the recommendation from the Cambridge professor who was her adviser for the semester she spent there during her junior year abroad from BYU). If you were at UCLA and got a recommendation from Terence Tao for math or Eugene Volokh for law saying you had “some talent”, I’m sure it would have the same impact. Then it depends on your field and whether you were lucky enough to attend their university and end up working for them. So really I think your point turns on the question of whether world famous professors are significantly more likely to take on such a mentoring role with individual undergraduates at certain universities.
I think professors all like to mentor talented students. World famous professors, however, have higher standards for their students. A student is less likely to get a “glowing” recommendation if s/he is relatively “mediocre” by their standards.
My goodness what a prodigious response to my little post. I stand by my original sentiment–which btw is unrelated to our experiences at Wake for which we paid full freight in cash, no loans.
A “prestigious” college degree may indeed have a variety of payoffs for those who don’t have to take out substantial loans to attend. For those who do, it’s a gamble likely not worth taking. You personally may not be encouraging people to do this, but you’re in the minority. I see the effects of this philosophy in my field (medicine) where far too many of our graduates are burdened with huge debt loads that they are increasingly unable to pay back, leaving them trapped. Again, nothing personal, my (Ivy League) med school loans were paid back decades ago. But I am alarmed by the growing bubble of educational debt that the younger generations are being subjected to.
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I think if you have the money to pay out of pocket for any college your child wants to go to, you shouldn’t look at it as an investment necessarily. It’s a luxury you can afford, if you want to buy it, you should. If you have to borrow money to obtain it, the ROI should be looked at much more carefully.
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This is circular reasoning, you’re saying that the best and brightest (whatever that means) are the best and brightest because they go to a prestigious college, and these colleges all have the best and brightest because, well, because they’re prestigious.
And UCLA had the most apps the past year because they only get the worst and the dimmest and there are a lot more of them, in contrast to the colleges that get the best and the brightest.
The posts from the devotees of the prestige college is a gift that keeps on giving, showing the silliness of the argument. I await the next one on why Harvard should be credited for Gates and Zuckerberg, but Michigan and Maryland should not be credited for Google, because well, Harvard is great and both UMs aren’t!
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That wasn’t my intent. I’m saying that many of the strongest under grads of any school seem to be attracted to graduate studies at many of the schools CC labels as prestigious. So why is that? Why are business students, the tops in their undergrad schools drawn to to HBS and GSB. Is it they are drawn to “prestige” like moths to a flame? Or could it possibly be that there is more to learn there than at other places?
Not sure I understand. Do you dispute that the most prestigious of colleges has the most robust pool from which to select students. If so given their low single digit acceptance rates and extensive “weeding out” process do you dispute that the elite schools do in fact attract, accept and matriculate the “best and the brightest whatever that means”?
Clearly other schools have exceptional students but my opinion and experience suggests that the aggregate pools at elite schools are superior in terms of academic performance, test scores, extra curriculars etc vs non elites.
Are you saying elite schools aren’t truly elite meaning more selective?
I know correlation doesn’t equate to causation but how do you explain the reality that Ivy+ graduates have such a disproportionately high representation across so many aspects of senior and impactful roles across society, business, and govt, etc?
Graduate is different than undergrad, there prestige or elite does make a difference at least for business and law, maybe science, less for engineering. This thread is about undergrad prestige.
Also the question about why so many undergrads from elite colleges are at these b-schools. Shouldn’t they be you know, running the world with their degrees. Why would a Yale or a Brown English major attend b-school, they attended the most prestigious colleges for that major? An English major from Rutgers, sure, you’d understand why they apply to b-schools, but a Yale English major, that’s rarified air isn’t it? They understand the literary world like Einstein understands the physical world, or so I’m told.
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They do a lot to get apps that they know they’ll reject to make their selectivity numbers look better. I would say that single digit schools are more double digit in terms of actual selectivity. Also the Harvard data from the lawsuit showed that athletes that were academically strong (but not superstars) had like a 80% chance of getting in, legacies 60%. Not too selective is it.
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