I’m in Madrid for a layover. With 9 hrs we went in the city.
Coming back I see two girls with suitcases, unsure of which train to take. I assure them they’re at the right platform.
We get on and I show them the two stops on the map for the airport.
We start talking. One tells me they graduated a year ago. I didn’t know -I asked hs or college. She says college. I asked from where.
She said Macalester. I said fine school. She said you’ve heard of it ? I’m like of course.
She said no one has heard of it - including me b4 I received a mailing.
I suppose few would consider it elite but it does show about name recognition. If not elite I’d say it’s certainly very strong.
She’s going to work this second year off as an EMT as she applies to more than 20 med schools. Interesting to me she says there’s a med school common app and you only do extra essays if they reach out to you. She’s taken the mcat twice and said in TN she’s applying to Meharry and E Tenn State. As she said, my score is not the best but good enough.
Interesting conversation for me. And interesting that kids will select schools that weren’t on the radar because they had never heard of them. Perhaps she got a great deal - didn’t ask…
So will going to those impressive schools have been worth it? Are those kids better off than they would have been attending someplace else? Ignore the bragging aspects, the cocktail party fodder, the parent wealth (or lack of it), and the post-grad financial support. Is that kid in a better position with friends, intelligence, and social assumptions of their abilities by strangers going forward than they would have been at a place with less “elite cache”?
If the answer is yes, then was the increased cost of attendance worth that bump?
There is no way to know, but given the opportunity, most people would invest an extra $100k on the chance that it makes a difference.
It doesn’t really matter what you or I (or anyone else on this thread) think. This guy obviously believes that his Harvard degrees have certain perceptions among the public (and his investors and lenders) that would benefit him and his company. Until Harvard loses its cachet (which may gradually happen over time), it’s hard to say that his belief is wrong.
If my kids attended Ivy League schools (or any other school) and I was still paying their rents and car payments when they were in their 20’s, I would be a little concerned (unless they were in grad school and I was helping out, or there was some other unforeseen circumstance).
I think it’s more “prestigious” for young adults to be self supportive, even if they live with 2 roommates in a 5th floor walk up and take the subway, then to pay for their expensive apartments and cars and tell people they attended an Ivy League school.
Its always funny to watch people talk in absolutes when they should be talking in probabilities. There is no question that a graduate from MIT is much more likely to be a more competent engineer then a graduate of a state school. The same can be said of all comparable majors (elite schools vs non elite) and it simply comes down the pool of students these schools are choosing from. The phrase “I know someone who graduated from a state school who is more competent than and MIT grad” is anecdotal and irrelevant to the overarching fact that in most cases they are not.
In other words, they should be talking about distributions. Some students from a non-elite school may outperform some students from an elite school because their distributions may overlap.
He may believe it is helping him (and it may well have helped him get to be CEO), but in reality it comes across as insecure and an attempt to demonstrate his superiority to other members of the management team, none of whom went to elite colleges (and most of whom are older than him). Definitely some interesting dynamics within that company.
My daughter just left her “gap year” type job at a well known institution. There were people of various ages (including young adults, recent grads etc) and nobody discussed where they went to college unless it naturally came up. Rather, they discussed their future plans, grad school/med school/psychology programs etc.
She also had no idea where her older coworkers attended college, and these people were clearly successful. She worked closely with these people and was more concerned with learning from them.
When she interviewed (6 weeks of interviews) nobody mentioned her school. They noted what she accomplished and that is what drove the conversation.
I cannot imagine a life where I attend cocktail parties and listen to people tell me where they went to college.
Well I prefer probabilities (but sure, you can describe it as a distribution) as an illustrative example…below is a simple one.
Event A - is the pool of well above average engineers at MIT, lets say 9/10
Event B - Now lets say the pool of well above average engineers at a state school is 5/20
The probability when comparing two random students where B is above average and A is not is denoted as P(A+B) which is simply P(A)*P(B) which in this case is .025 or 2.5%. Again, this is only an illustrative example as I simply made up the numbers of “well above average” engineers at each school, albeit they are very reasonable numbers. This is not meant to be a perjorative discussion of state schools, and certainly a few state flagship schools are on par (or close to it) with MIT.
100% agree, but that’s not the conversation, and where threads like this take on the bias you mention from every discussion participant.
The issue of “worth” is about the individual. Is it worth the assumed extra cost to attend MIT vs. Georgia Tech (could be any state school…just picking a good engineering school based on my assumption the MIT kid isn’t an English major, which creates its own sprial for a thread like this)?
Obviously, there is no way to know. The “answer” requires an understanding of both the student and every person they will interact with for the remainder of their work-related lives. It’s amusing that anyone even attempts to answer for another…it’s pointless.
In practice and ‘real life’, this is meaningless though. The most likely scenario is that the MIT engineer is working side-by-side with colleagues who have graduated from many different colleges, making the same salary as those in the same job.
Sure there are some like that but the probability that an MIT grad makes more then a state school grad is fairly high on average. Engineers are not all the same, the “well above average engineer” tends to rise faster to higher levels of responsibility and commensurate pay.
Well I am using some basic common sense here, do you not agree that the pool MIT chooses from is not significantly better then the pool of applicants a state school chooses from? It’s in the common data set for universities. A->B->C the links are clearly there.
I would prefer to return to topic. Any user searching for an intro course in statistics is welcome to view the offerings at their local community college
I guess if their objective is for people to say “wow you must be really smart” to have gone to (insert prestigious school) then, yes, I am sure it was worth the extra $150K more.
