Can you please explain what you mean by non med school biology majors benefiting from elite bias? What would they get that would not be achieved at a strong flagship (I am not against attending an Ivy League)?
2 Likes
Research…Pharma…education. If you believe there is a bias in favor of elite graduates, then they would benefit. Is it worth spending more… plenty of opinions on that above.
For biology?
why not? They are hired by human beings who are at least generally familiar with the education system in the US.
My daughter was a bio major and had an unbelievable experience at her flagship and beyond (not suggesting an Ivy is not “worth it” if you want to attend and it is affordable).
1 Like
That’s awesome. That’s exactly what everyone should get from college.
“Worth it” is entirely your opinion. It’s not right or wrong, and depends on how you feel others might perceive your daughters’ abilities (for better or worse) had she gone to an “elite” school vs. where she attended.
You’re happy. She’s happy. Who cares about what others think?
1 Like
I was just genuinely curious about what she would have gotten if she attended an Ivy for biology.
We’ll never know… and that’s just fine.
1 Like
I don’t ask the “what if” question… 
Gifting this editorial, which seems a propos of this thread (or at least part of it), in that it makes the point that journalists of all pedigrees ended up at WaPo:
2 Likes
This is absolutely true! After engineers get into the workforce, it’s very meritocratic. Interestingly, there’s no correlation to where they went to undergrad.
3 Likes
Many of those top HS students did not reach their full potential in HS and did not excel in a real way: yes they were Val /got top grades and high scores, but without a large group of academic peers their classes may have been taught more rote-memorization and to a level below their potential, or if they had truly challenging classes they may have been one of only 1-2 kids of 20 to really understand the difficult challenge problems, so were always explaining and teaching to others yet never on the receiving end of learning from peers. We paid for ours to go to private school to get a larger group of academic peers compared to what we had in HS, and to get them more prepared for any college(as we felt our public education paled in comparison to the preparation our private-school counterparts had when we all started at our ivy-plus in the 90s).
The choice to go to a college with a huge % of academic peers means they have classes with kids mostly on a similar level and the professors can teach on a very high level. There are definitely more than just the ivy-plus schools recent articles discuss that provide this level of learning environment for the top kids, but there are very real differences among colleges outside the top 50-100 and those at the top. I know details of the first two years of Engineering courses at the flagship that is supposed to be the main Engineering school in our state, and my close family member knows the details of another state’s Engineering “flagship”. (These two schools are not on any list of top30 engineering schools in the country—but they are in the top50-75). They have a completely different classroom experience than CMU and Duke. Tests are rote memorization. No professor research incorporated , no or rare challenge problems. CMU and Duke and other very-top engineering programs are known for having all that and more. Those are places where the smartest HS students can have a large group of true academic peers to really push them. That academically elite environment is worth it, to a lot of students, and yes many parents, and it has less to do with future career /salary and more to do with true fit and being pushed to your potential.
In a previous post from several years ago, I compared CollegeScorecard reported earnings by college type and USNWR ranking. Some of the majors that showed the highest correlation between median earnings and USNWR ranking were economics, mathematics, and computer science. Economics and mathematics makes sense due to the “elite” finance connection. “Elite” finance is one of the few fields that is known for emphasizing college name. CS was more of a surprise to me. I suspect this involves a wide disparity in salary ranges, with higher salary positions being concentrated in a certain high cost of living areas (SV, NYC, Seattle, …), and grads from certain colleges being more/less likely to stay in region vs moving to those areas upon graduation.
Some of the majors that showed the least correlation between median earnings and USNWR ranking were non-CS engineering, education, and chemistry. All of these fields showed less correlation between college selectivity and earnings than one might expect from differences in average student quality, suggesting less 1st year earnings premium for being a high achieving student than in other fields.
Biology fell somewhere in between The median first year earnings for biology majors at all US colleges was $28k compared to $36k for Ivies and $34k for non-Ivy T20s. That is a significant difference, but median earnings remained low at all school types.
2 Likes
Nearly all? Now that’s just silly. Very few of my classmates are engineers. Off the top of my head, less than 20%
1 Like
Everything is relative. They exceled but they may not have exceled to their full potential. High schools are also a little different from colleges. They were still kids in high schools and most of them didn’t, or didn’t want to, focus too much of their energy on academics. For many of them, colleges may be their best and last chance to excel to their full academic potential.
1 Like
But how many kids view their Ivy League experience as a way to maximize their intellectual potential? Unfortunately, I’d suggest more see it as a necessary credential on their route to MBB or IB. In fact most of this thread is focused on outcomes/connections/networking as the aspect of elite schooling that makes it “worth it”. There has been almost nothing said about learning/the spirit of inquiry/expanding one’s mind.
9 Likes
If one of the engineering schools you are talking about is Virginia Tech, it is ranked #16 in undergraduate engineering, same as Duke. My husband went to CMU engineering (which you mention), and he had no problem with our kids going to Virginia Tech and Virginia instate for engineering. They got wonderful educations, had great social experiences, and both are very successful in their careers.
7 Likes
It reminds me of my MBA program. We worked our tails off.
My roomie went to Cornell undergrad and his best friend was at Wharton for MBA.
He (the Wharton student) said they had little rigor but the focus from day one was job search. The guy was never stressed like we were. And while I don’t know where he is today, he had a job as a research analyst at a mutual fund company.
I wish they did. I’ve voiced my concern about misallocation of human capital in other threads, so I won’t repeat it here. I also understand the temptation of Ivy League if the goal is one of those careers (I witnessed personally how one of the elite groups at an elite firm would only seriously look at applicants who went to less than a handful of schools many, many years ago – so things may have changed a little bit). But even the Ivy League send only a small fraction of their graduates to those places. Moreover, I don’t view those careers as pinnacle of success. As a matter of fact, they face a good chance of disintermediation in a not-too-distant future, IMO.
2 Likes
And by many of the same posters.
Anyway, we’ve exhausted this trimester’s conversation. See you in 3 months. 
8 Likes