Is it the people that they hire, or the training and instruction that they give to the people that they hire?
Do any retail stores test prospective checkout people for speed when they consider hiring them?
Not sure about the ethnic food stores. Costco hires people who do their jobs better and pays them more than typical supermarkets.
The question should be answered differently by every individual student/family. What’s probably most important and applies to all, is that the right process/school is chosen in the end.
The comparison cannot be made necessarily between state schools and elite schools, because there are many elite state schools, with examples from (but not limited to) California to Virginia, and Texas.
The net cost of attending college is different from applicant to applicant, with tuition/awards/scholarship/FA particulars that are specific to each applicant/family.
A relevant comparison would be to compare net cost for a specific individual/family, and compare the schools where he/she is admitted. That comparison would expand on factors like major, personal preferences, ROI, etc … in the end will be a list of affordable schools, and some will be willing to make a greater financial sacrifice between one and another school.
I regularly go to both Costco and Vons. Glassdoor lists a nearly identical median salary for cashiers in my area at both Costco and Vons – between $34k and $35k per year at both, which is slightly above full time minimum wage for my area… Nevertheless, I estimate that on average Costco lines moves faster than Vons for a similar number of items. This relates to several factors.
One is a smaller portion of items are slow items at Costco. For example, fruits tend to slow down the process at Vons. The cashier needs to enter a 4 digit code corresponding to the fruit. Many cashiers don’t know the code by memory and need to look it up in a booklet. After entering the code, they need to weigh the fruit. Sometimes the scale is broken. In contrast at Costco, there is no weighing or entering codes for fruit – just scan the fruit and move to the next item.
Another is the Costco checkout design. Costco’s checkout has a unique structure that involves cashiers working in 2 person teams, with the cart moving on the same side as the 2 cashiers with a good portion of items still remaining in the cart, so there is no unload and reload. In contrast Vons seems less thoughtfully structured. Many times there is only 1 cashier rather than a 2-person team. When there are 2, one of the 2 only does bagging.
Vons has a higher rate of errors. These include human errors, partially relating to inexperience. Vons has a higher rate of new employees, including some that appear to be HS students doing a summer job. Costco seems to have less turnover and a higher rate of experienced employees. Vons also has a higher rate of bugs and errors. At least 1/3 of the time, I catch some kind of error when checking out at Vons. These errors include things like Vons 4 You coupons not going through, items being priced at something other than what is listed in the store, or the wrong item name appearing altogether. Sometimes the payment device fails to work. It’s fairly common for a supervisor need to intervene. None of this has ever happened at Costco.
More to the original point, there are certainly some persons who perform better at their job than others including some cashiers who perform better than others, but that’s very different from saying elite colleges are worth it in a financial sense, which relates to why employers typically emphasize other criteria besides college name when deciding who to hire.
For example, in my field of engineering, employers do try to hire the employees who will be most successful at the job. However, the employers I am familiar with don’t do this by focusing on whether the applicant attended an “elite” college or not. Instead they focus on whether the potential hire has the desired major and degree level (EE or CS, depending on position), skillset matching the ones listed in the job description, and experience doing something similar to the job position… best of all having previously worked with employees at the company where they have seen work performance, such as in internship. After identifying likely candidates, the interview process evaluates both technical skill and company fit. Technical skill interview involves solving a variety of engineering problems that relate to the job position, as well as discussing past experience.
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I implied that the outcome is influenced by the individual student, so you cannot assume all students attending a particular college have the same ROI. Said differently, if a particular student is choosing between college X and college Y, he/she should not assume his earnings will be the same as the average for all students at college X and college Y. I’d expect earnings to more follow the particular student and related individual student variables (high/low achieving, personal qualities, major and planned career path, location, , …) than the eliteness of college name.
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I think there are a lot of variables when it comes to deciding whether a school is “worth it.” Finances, career path, personality etc.
My daughter was an Ivy caliber kid in HS (there are many here, she’s certainly NOT unique) and chose to attend a strong flagship as a biology major. When I look at her accomplishments and opportunities, I have a hard time imagining that they would have been greater at an Ivy (for her particular major).
“Worth it” depends. If you like the school and can afford it, by all means it is worth it!
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I’d assume these experienced employees at Costco are paid better than the new employees at Vons, regardless of what Glassdoor says. My understanding is that Costco also offers much better benefits than stores like Vons.
I compared Costco with other grocery stores, not because of elite vs non-elite college comparison, but to illustrate that there’s a wide dispersion in abilities/skills even in a supposedly low-skill job with similar requirements, and that no one is exactly average and conclusions drawn from the use of averages or medians are often misleading.
Now back to original point of the thread. Elite college graduates do enjoy certain benefits from the “halo effect”, deservedly or not, at the other end of the spectrum (from the example of grocery store employees). For example, investors, and the public at large, tend to assume certain minimal level of competence from an elite college graduate. One of the first things they do is often to look at the bios of the principals behind a product/service/company, when they are being pitched for the product/service/company. They associate a Harvard graduate with certain level of competency even though s/he might be the worst student there ever.
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Skimmed through the thread. Question has been out there a long time, nothing new here. Someone mentioned donut hole. That may be the only relevant variable as the elite schools tend to do a tremendous job of providing non-loan based need aid to minimize the cost differential. Still may be more expensive than in state state U but not nearly the 200k differential. In many cases it will actually be less then the in state option. And as someone else mentioned, if the money doesn’t matter, the math doesn’t matter.
That leaves the donut hole folks (like me) to ponder this question. We don’t live in parallel universes so there’s literally no way to know the right answer. In fact there is no right answer.
For a variety of reasons, we chose to go the small private route and it worked out great. Kid got a great education, has a great job in a cool city, and most of his college peers / friends did the same. Loved his experience and will value it forever. Would that have happened at State U (basically full ride BTW)? Maybe. We’ll never know. The one thing I do observe is his current situation vs. many of his local HS peers who did state U. He’s on a different career trajectory that will likely lead to top MBA and/or significant career at a major firm (not IB or consulting). Most of his HS peers are living near or at home with decent but much lower tier jobs. Part of that is a function of what’s available around here. I think many of them had coming home and finding something as their priority, as they want to be here. That can be limiting as. although this is a nice place, it’s not where one would start their career if they wanted to be where the action is.
Could he have landed in his exact situation going to state U. Probably because it’s mainly about the kid, but I do think it was easier (not necessarily because of OCR - wasn’t for this firm). In general, the there was an expectation of landing a great opportunity and an ecosystem to support that, literally from day 1. To me that’s a big difference than the large universities that don’t have the visible resources.
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That was our exact same experience at a large public flagship. And resources were highly visible.
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But we wouldn’t have had an opportunity to consider the relative merits of Vons vs. Costco checkout, including the component parts of a standard shopping cart and the value of 2 people vs. 1 in the checkout process.
You are 100% correct. This is a conversation about individuals, and until we can study twins with similar cognitive abilities who separate for college, everything is biased and hearsay.
Just to throw another wrench into the unknowable… We have finally reached the point where those who are leading organizations attended college during the age of selectivity. I would suggest that the college on a resume may be evaluated more than ever. Maybe all of the Flagship kids who are successful will take out their residual anger about college admissions on the next generation of selective kids.
This thread is like asking “What car should I buy”? Only you know the answer.
Not sure I understand. Why would flagship kids have “residual anger”?
And many flagships that are the best in their field (for example, in CS and engineering) are highly selective, especially for OOS. So the two are not mutually exclusive.
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There is nothing to understand. It’s my bias. You do you.
Are you suggesting that for the rest of your life you will be telling people where you went to undergrad school…or that they will care?
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That’s a very short sighted way to look at debt. You have other expenses. You can’t simply say it’ll cost me a year of salary.
Will you pay rent? Eat food? Drive a car? Ever travel? Invest for retirement?
That debt will drag a lot harder than you’ve factored.
It might be worth it, but at the end of the day the effectiveness and efficiency of your code will be what makes or breaks you, not the name on the diploma. And, it’s something that can be back tested, easily.
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Or he can just say he went to Harvard even if he goes to Hofstra.
No one will know - till he gets fired and scandalized 
In the meantime, the student can think everyone thinks they are big time.
If someone says that they graduated from Columbia or Cornell, do you necessarily know which one?
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The other factor is who you meet along with networking. DD and husband graduated just a few years ago from the same “elite” college and are well on there way to having a net income of over $1M between the two of them. Most people don’t like to talk about that kind of elitism but the fact is that who you meet in college is important and almost all of those students attending “elite” colleges definitely have something going for them.
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Thank you for being you! It’s refreshing when perceptions of typical Ivy grads are reinforced in black and white, rather than having to read between the lines.
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Well not sure about that - but you needn’t go anywhere. And still say you did to impress if that’s the goal - and for a lot less than $380k.
We know there are folks out there who lie. They do fine by mid-stating.
In the workplace, honestly those folks blend in with co workers. Those who perform best are usually most impressive to their colleagues regardless of where they went.
Certainly one can fall into a chance meeting, but for most, elite school or otherwise, their career network is built on the job.