<p>“When students were asked to set financial concerns aside, they said they would prefer to work in the arts, media, and public service rather than in business, consulting, and finance (20 percent said they would remain in those sectors).”</p>
<p>Have another look at post #67. If HYP(S …Wharton) have mysterious amazing mojo that nobody else has for getting their graduates jobs at 2 or 3 unbelieveably desirable firms … then how does Vanderbilly stack up against the other also-rans? Is V any more excluded than Brown or Cornell? A standard that only distinguishes 3 or 5 or 10 super exclusive schools from 3000 other schools isn’t a very useful standard for the vast majority of students.</p>
<p>tk, you’ve given me a wrong sample – they’re distinguished people not graduates of Vanderbilt in the last 10 years or so. There’s nothing that we can draw out of that. Aside from it’s a small sample size, it’s typical of a list a school like Rice, Washington, Emory, and such can come up with, because theyre undeniably excellent schools for undergrad, but not really prestigious to the sight of top grad schools, top employers (banking/finance, in particular), academic community, and in the global arena, in general. Maybe it will help if you can show me evidence that the top grad schools, as well as, the top companies are interested in Vanderbilt grads only that they’re not interested in joining in them instead. I know thats hard to find, because I know it’s not true that Vanderbilt grads aren’t interested in such schools and/or careers.</p>
<p>Please leave Harvard out of this because the top recruiters, top grad school adcoms, academic people, etc., do not view Harvard and Vanderbilt equally. In fact that’s something that you need to prove, as that’s what the OP was curious to know about too.</p>
<p>Well then, for a poor schlub who graduates from one of these schools, it would appear there is still the possibility for great success without the benefit of that prestige (unless all the opportunities have dried up in the last 10 years or so for everyone but bulge bracket investment bankers.)</p>
<p>I’m not the one claiming a correlation between prestige and outcomes. There seems to be a body of research that has looked for it, but failed to find it (search for “annasdad”). The burden of proof is on you, I think, to show that an ultra-prestigious diploma is necessary for whatever outcome you’re trying to decribe. Are you now saying that Vanderbilt won’t cut it not only for the bulging banks but also for top graduate/professional schools?</p>
<p>If all you’re claiming is that a few super-selective schools have some extra cachet that other mereley selective schools lack, o.k., many of us would agree. However, it is pretty hard to measure the precise effects of that cachet that can be distinguished clearly from other, confounding factors. The best research evidence (Krueger & Dale) appears to indicate that its effect on income, for most alumni, is minimal.</p>
<p>Tk, the reason why we don’t reconcile in this discussion is because you’re looking at this issue from a high school student’s stand point whilst I’m looking this from a different angle – graduates(output), that’s why my bases are employment success at the top companies and grad school placement to the grad school programs, amongst others.
I think we need to agree first on who should determine prestige more, will it be the high school students or the employers/grad school adcoms.</p>
<p>Actually, RML, it bespeaks a high-school mindset to continue to prattle on about prestige the way you have. There hasn’t been a single school under discussion in this thread that won’t get a motivated student where he or she wants to go in life. I intend no offense to people who choose these careers, but I cannot imagine how boring and soul-deadening it would be to live in a milieu where everyone is either an i-banker, lawyer or consultant! It is hard to believe that you would ask tk21769 “like what career opportunities?” as if you couldn’t imagine some other options. There are plenty of smart people, actually people with top-drawer intellects and exceptional talent, who would rather be bug exterminators than work in some of the fields you seem to think define a finite set of dream careers.</p>
<p>Honestly, RML, I thought you were a high-school student from another country. Of course employers will consider their own companies “prestigious.” Especially in the case of IB and private-equity firms, they’re not going to admit to the corruption and mismanagement that has led to real harm to the U.S. and other economies around the world. Countless people have had their lives irreparably damaged by the greed of the corporate vultures—many of whom came from Harvard or Wharton. What they’ve done is nothing to be proud of. People are waking up to the idea that a lot of these people should be in jail, not put on a pedestal just because they make vast amounts of money for themselves and their investors.</p>
<p>But it doesn’t prove a point. Here are the ranges of possible careers a student could go into:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ</p>
<p>What you are doing is saying - But look! G, P and W don’t recruit at Vanderbilt!
Ignoring the fact that they do indeed recruit at those schools … you have somehow elevated G, P and W to being “markers” of prestige. What we are challenging you with is the notion that Goldman and McK have magic sceptres that make them the anointers of power and prestige, and that wherever they deign to hold their interview schedules means something other than what serves Goldman and McK’s purposes.</p>
<p>It also seems you don’t have a clue about corporate recruiting. I do, as I’ve done it at the director level for years. GS and McK aren’t making grand pronouncements about school quality when they recruit at certain schools and not at others. They are not saying “These non-recruited schools are clearly cruddy schools full of people who can’t tie their shoelaces.” It’s simply that in order to run their organization efficiently, they need to narrow down their recruiting to places where they know they will have a “thick” concentration of people who are interested and who are well qualified. That’s not to say that they are making a grand pronouncement that people elsewhere aren’t smart – but they simply can’t recruit at every top college in the country, no one can.</p>
<p>GS and McK are not judges of school quality. They are judges of what schools often produce a good number of interested and qualified candidates that suit their particular recruitiing purposes. Those two things are not the same. Harvard wouldn’t lose any quality points if GS stopped recruiting there tomorrow. Nor would it lose any prestige points.</p>
<p>Eewww, could one be more nouveau riche? What makes you think Harvard is “prouder” of the students who go to GS or McKinsey versus the students who become engineers at environmental consulting firms or write books or start small businesses or anything else? </p>
<p>I think you don’t understand that prestige is not measured by careeers YOU are personally impressed by. A school has prestige if it equips the students to have the resources and connections to be able to do what THEY want to do. If 30% of Harvard grads want to go into i-banking and only 15% of Yale grads wanted to, that wouldn’t make H more “prestigious” than Yale.</p>
<p>“Here’s a list of the 68 undergraduate institutions (Albion College to Yeshiva U) represented in a recent entering class of YLS”</p>
<p>You mean a Vanderbilt grad actually made it to Yale law school? Let us inform Yale so they rectify this mistake and throw this person out right away.</p>
<p>But “top company” is in the eye of the beholder. The “top companies” in your set are Goldman Sachs, McK, etc. The “top companies” for students interested in brand management might be Kraft, Nestle or Procter & Gamble. The “top companies” for someone interested in environmental causes might be … oh, I don’t know, whatever. Somehow you seem to think GS and McK are companies that people who aren’t interested in those fields should still look to and care about.</p>
<p>absweetmarie - RML had a post in which he talked about liking when the drycleaner recognized his sweatshirt. Recognition by others of “his” school is extraordinarily important to him. Whatever. People who know quality don’t need to care whether other people know it as well. No one going to Vanderbilt need worry about a thing. It has more than enough prestige for anybody’s purposes.</p>
<p>Nor will other universities suddenly become more prestigious if these firms started recruiting their graduates more heavily.</p>
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<p>Well, RML believes his POV is the same as Harvard’s. His own patented prestige formula weights salary at 30%. So of course IB is better than a small business or writing career.</p>
<p>RML, I find it incredibly sad that you are pushing the same nonsense you were three years ago. Even your language is almost exactly the same. “Again, Berkeley is in the top 10 and is a - no-brainer - superior to Emory and Vanderbilt.”</p>
<p>You know, RML, how “prestigious” is what YOU do for a living? Is that really important to you? I have a reasonably fancy undergrad and part of a grad degree (I dropped out when I was pregnant with twins and never looked back) - and I think I’ve had a great career, both in terms of intellectual stimulation, getting to travel the world, work with fabulous clients and be paid well enough that I can send 2 kids to top schools at full-pay. That’s enough for me. I couldn’t care less if the people around me went to the very tippiest-of-top schools or not. I am no more impressed by a successful hedge fund manager than I am a successful high school teacher. Why is it “better” to be a successful hedge fund manager than a successful high school teacher? Richer, sure, I’ll grant you. But how is it any more worthy of praise? At the end of the day, they are both jobs. Do them well and to the best of your ability – that’s the meaning of life. </p>
<p>In marketing, we call this badge value. Why is that badge value so important to you?</p>
<p>And what IS it with your “banking / finance in particular”? They are simply no more or no less important than any other job out there. Why do you place them on such a pedestal?</p>
<p>^ I tried to find the articles which mentioned the goal of financial aid at either Harvard or Princeton (one of them mentions in the announcement) is to allow the graduating student to pursue their true passions, public service etc without a need to get a job that pays the most in order to start paying off loans. </p>
<p>I have come across several alums lately at college presentations who have become teachers through teach for america or have returned from Americorps.</p>
Business Insider recently surveyed real professionals to ask this very same question: what are the best law schools in the country? They corroborate very well with the other sources I have listed and back up everything that I have stated.</p>
<p>Methodology: More than 650 of our readers responded, of which 60 percent had J.D.s. and 69 percent had hiring experience. Thirty-six percent of the respondents work in legal fields, 23 percent work in finance, 10 percent work in technology, 6 percent are current law students, and 6 percent work in consulting.</p>
LOL its you who posts Peer Assessment scores without considering their implications and how they often are lagging indicators of actual reputation since many of the people who vote are judges and lawyers who graduated law school in the 1970s when Michigan was still a top 5 law school for instance. I’m showing you actual data and facts based on actual hiring data to valdiate my claims. My sources are the NLJ and one of the most respected law school blogs out there. Yours are what…yourself and aging lawyers?</p>
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Yes, its common knowledge that a 1/3 of Yale Law’s graduating class pursues clerkships so they are automatically out of the Big Law picture. Besides, I think we both know Yale rocks so there’s no reason to even talk about this special law school.</p>
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I was being lenient and left school-funded jobs as part of the “Employed” portion when in reality, a lot of them are administrative jobs that the school hands its graduates who don’t find gainful employment to boost their job statistics. The reason I counted that statistic is that some of the top law schools actually give out great school-funded legal positions while others don’t so included it to be consistent. Also, I’m not sure where you are getting that Duke has a lower under-employment rate than Yale; even counting school-funded jobs, Yale is a solid 3 percent or so better.</p>
<p>Georgetown and Cornell are law schools notorious for accepting way too many students and not providing them with adequate career services so I’m not surprised their “under employment” rate is much higher.</p>
<p>GW is known as a school that hands out a lot of school-funded jobs so that inflates their emoployment statistics. Here’s what the ranking would like if we counted the employed graduates in JD-preferred jobs but removed the “School-Funded” score and counted everything else:</p>
<p>There’s a very clean ranking that matches up with society’s actual reputation of the top law schools. In fact, I would go as far as to remove the “Public Interest Score” since a lot of these are low-paying jobs that schools fund with their LRAP (Loan Repayment Assistance Program) but they serve value to society and some law schools graduates want to give back to their community so I will include them. UMich would look even worse if I took the “Public Interest Score” away. ;)</p>
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Keep firing away with the personal attacks and ad-hominems Alexandre! I will continue to debunk all of your assertions using data and facts like any other rational human being. In a decade or so, the Peer Assessment/Law Firm/Judge scores from USNWR will match what all the other credible surveys are saying since the generation of lawyers who grew up worshipping Michigan Law during its “Top 5 days” will no longer be alive.</p>
<p>It’s a good thing you’re ferociously fighting the Which is the Best Law School battle since that is, of course, directly relevant to the OP’s question about Vanderbilt undergrad vs Ivy undergrad. Good grief, is there any thread into which Michigan and Berkeley and Duke cannot be dragged into?</p>