<p>did anyone else notice they said MIT is an Ivy League school…</p>
<p>edit: ha looks like someone else did while i was looking through to see if i could find any other mistakes, and it did seem like either michigan’s tuition wasnt right or they had the tuition for a semester</p>
<p>Well it’s not perfect but it is interesting and presents a somewhat non-traditional view…
one that most CC parents will dismiss I’m sure. </p>
<p>I can see the point about scale and efficiency tipping the scales to large State Universities, but I’m also intrigued by the recruiter comments. </p>
<p>"Recruiters say graduates of top public universities are often among the most prepared and well-rounded academically, and companies have found they fit well into their corporate cultures and over time have the best track record in their firms. " </p>
<p>Interesting. Just as an aside, my son currently works for a large local employer. His bosses and peers are not from elite institutions. They recruit from in-state public schools and local universities. They pay well and offer lots of opportunities. Most of the new grads are hired from their internships and coops. </p>
<p>Anyway, good to see PSU come up #1 here vs. on that annual party school survey. :)</p>
<p>^I though only my son’s GC thought MIT was an Ivy league school! (He ended up at the WSJ top rated private college.)</p>
<p>“Big, mostly public, schools in high population areas” from post 5</p>
<p>The first 4 are actually clearly college towns as are many of the rest. I doubt any recruiter really wants to visit College Station, TX for the heck of it!</p>
<p>No defense for calling MIT Ivy but back when I was involved in IB recruiting…we had what we called an “Ivy Plus” group…all the ivies plus Duke, MIT, Stanford. </p>
<p>Per Wikepedia:<br>
The term “Ivy Plus” is sometimes used to refer to the Ancient Eight plus several other schools for purposes of alumni associations,university affiliations, or endowment comparisons. In his book Untangling the Ivy League, Zawel writes, “The inclusion of non-Ivy League schools under this term is commonplace for some schools and extremely rare for others. Among these other schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University are almost always included. The University of Chicago and Duke University are often included as well.”</p>
<p>A lot of people I speak with on the West Coast think Rutgers is Ivy League! I tell my daughter that & she laughs. I emailed her the link to the article this morning.</p>
<p>""Recruiters say graduates of top public universities are often among the most prepared and well-rounded academically, and companies have found they fit well into their corporate cultures and over time have the best track record in their firms. “”</p>
<p>Indeed interesting. This jives well with comments from recruiters that I have heard, including things like ‘that Princeton grad was too full of himself or too privileged, etc.’ All stats being equal the company may indeed find that the state school candidate is the better character fit. An Ivy education doesn’t translate into a “better impression,” in fact, it’s often - for better or for worse, wrong or right - seen as a negative. In the same way inaccurate stereotypes persist about state school students (partiers, not as ambitious, etc.), inaccurate stereotypes also persist on the other side (rich, arrogant, privileged) with, I would argue, equal force, even at very tippy-top levels of management. </p>
<p>Somewhat of an aside, but a bias that hasn’t been brought up too frequently on CC.</p>
<p>But yeah, there’s some pretty big mistakes in the article…that doesn’t make the data less interesting, though.</p>
<p>Regardless of how people define Ivy League or if recruiters prefer to go to large schools, this was an interesting set of articles. This was one of our son’s considerations when selecting which college to accept: who recruited, and more important, who hired the graduates in his choice of major. He picked the school that we now see WSJ ranks as #1 in his field. We already knew that it was a favorite school of recruiters because they knew the students were prepared to successfully enter the work force. And indeed he was recruited by several top companies in his field this year and received an excellent offer from one of them, and began working a few weeks ago. Granted it wasn’t necessarily his favorite company, but he is now working in his field in the part of country where he wants to be, with an excellent salary and benefits and the opportunity to make contacts with a multitude of companies.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If you look at how they did the rankings, you might understand how misinformed this statement is.</p>
<p>Consider the majors that the survey covered, all practical job oriented ones, and in quite a few cases, majors not even offered at many elite colleges (Harvard for engineering, anyone?). </p>
<p>Next, consider what percentage of the respective student bodies even pick such majors? You think Purdue, which graduates thousands per year, has thousands that are engineering majors? Think again. </p>
<p>So all the “rankings” say to me is that if you want to hire some kinds of grads with certain kinds of practical skills, you go to where the fish are - big state universities. Is that an inspired insight? Is that hard to grasp?</p>
<p>What would be interesting is to see a similar survey, except asking about liberal arts majors. Last time I checked, even at our mammoth state universities, that’s where most of the bodies are?</p>
<p>I used to recruit for a major consulting firm, and I HATED recruiting at the small 2nd tier LACs (eg, there was one at about #80 that I used to have to go to regularly). They were usually out in the sticks AND the quality of the recruits was not very good. We really had to bring a person or two in for an office visit out of the daily interview schedules to maintain a good relationship with the school, but often I would struggle to find even one “keeper” in a whole day of interviews. I very much preferred recruiting at the large public university; less travel, and better candidates (even though our public university is not ranked that highly). This from a parent whose kid goes to a slightly higher ranked LAC… but I do not think she will be looking for jobs with a major corporation when she graduates. </p>
<p>I never recruited at a better LAC. I expect that would have been a somewhat better experience (I think I would have seen smarter, more articulate candidates).</p>
<p>I guess my beef is more with how USNews rates schools. And because of the influence USNews has how schools seem to target those measures as opposed to what is really important. Even if you assume kids from top private universities arent interested in getting entry level jobs at the major companies that recruit college kids, most of these kids do go on to some sort of graduate education. I would find it most interesting to see what schools have kids that score best on entry exams and which schools graduate schools believe do the best job of preparing kids. I think there are some top notch highly ranked LAC schools that do a great job of that-but my guess is that you might be surprised at some of the schools that don’t.</p>
<p>I think it is safe to conclude that if you go to a good state U and major in a practical area your chances at a good job in corporate America are as good as anyone’s. I think most students and parents would be happy with that knowledge alone.</p>
<p>I suspect that you’d have to know the educational background of the recruiters to understand this. I suspect, for example, that the recruiter who says the Princeton grad is too “full of himself” is not a graduate of a highly selective school himself.</p>
<p>I think it is safe to conclude that if you go to any four year U, major in anything, and are willing to keep an open mind re: geography, industry, or function, your chances at a good job in corporate America are “as good as anyone’s”. What becomes controversial is when a graduating senior is not willing to consider anything-- i.e. won’t join the Budget Rent-a-Car management training program, or become a claims examiner for an insurance company, or move to Dayton Ohio for a two year rotation.</p>
<p>I manage a team which hires hundreds of new grads a year. We are constantly amazed by the ever-increasing entitlement and narcissism that the new grads seem to exhibit. This is not an Ivy vs. Penn State phenomenon, this seems to be a cultural shift across the board. The generation who was raised to get a trophy in Little League just for showing up seems accustomed to getting trophies for the rest of their lives. Kids whose “learning differences” were accomodated in K-12 don’t understand that they won’t get a private secretary on day one “Because I have difficulty with Executive Functioning and can’t keep a calendar”. Kids who grew up on spellcheck and were able to use calculators on arithmetic tests because “calculating is boring” (that’s a direct quote) don’t understand that some jobs require the ability to estimate numbers in their head (not talking multivariate equations here… just “what is 17% of $200?” type of math.</p>
<p>Lesson to kids- go to college. Excel in your chosen field. Work hard and get involved in some meaningful activities outside the classroom. Drop the attitude.</p>
<p>You will do fine.</p>
<p>This article is so bad on so many levels…I am really disappointed in WSJ, which is my favorite publication. I know many Ivy and top LAC grads who have tremendous practical experience and landed good jobs, and I know a lot of (recent) state school grads who couldn’t find their way to the interview! The job market is horrible and recruiters have cut back. No news there.<br>
A recent Ivy grad targeted a large company that did not recruit at his school and which, in fact, mainly recruited at a range of state universities (ranging from UVA to Big 10 schools). He was told that the company didn’t think students from that school would be interested enough for the recruiting effort to be put there, but he was regarded as an extremely attractive candidate and got the job. We all have these stories in both directions.
Everytime we start these wars where the state school advocates need to make sure everyone knows their schools are really better than the highly selective schools because “look how many students turned down the Ivies” and the other side needs to make sure their $200K full-pay to a snob name school was well-spent it makes me want to go back to the TV shows thread.</p>
<p>Blossom- good post.</p>
<p>The annual party school survey found out 1+1>2. though misleading but interesting and get published. if the survey found out 1+1=2, it is boring and would have been thrown into trash can.</p>
<p>I wasn’t expecting the WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch, to publish an article showing that colleges such as Harvard or any other so-called liberal elite institutions to be at the top of a list. Any more than would be reported by an anchor on Fox news.</p>
<p>Obviously, as MOMW and other point out, plenty of Ivy and top-LAC grads go on to get good jobs.</p>
<p>I would like to see some numbers. For example, if 10,000 people a year graduate from Michigan, Ohio State, or Penn State, there are going to be a lot more of those graduates around. Most of the Ivies are fairly small schools, and although they take jobs around the world, there are just not that many of them. They are a novelty in the states in the Midwest and South where flagships rule.</p>
<p>We get ourselves in a frenzy over which schools are prefered by recruiters when the truth is that going to a huge flagship is much easier on the recruiters than traveling all over the place to recruit. I would also argue that a fair number (certainly not all or even half) of Ivy League graduates know where they are going to work. They are going to work for family companies and companies where they have contacts through family and friends–or companies or organizations where they have completed internships or made other contacts.</p>
<p>"If the comments from state school advocates are misleading, the comments from “prestigious” school advocates are equally so.|
"</p>
<p>If and when I see a “prestige school advocate” posting as misleading a document, I will contest it. Usually there is no need to, as they are attacked almost instantly here.</p>
<p>"No-one is saying that this article means state schools have BETTER prospects at jobs than MIT grads "</p>
<p>actually I think that was the implication of the WSJ article, and of the first couple of posts here.</p>
<p>"- it merely means that the common assumption that state school graduates have LESS prospects is not true. In fact, the article counters that there is actually more recruitment going on at state schools. "</p>
<p>Whether the prospects are lesser, greater, or the same cannot be answered from this poll. It only asks which schools the recruiters prefer to recruit at, and says NOTHING about the implications for students. Indeed some of the comments indicate that the recruiters preferred state schools, BECAUSE the competition for grads was less intense there.</p>
<p>" guess my beef is more with how USNews rates schools. "</p>
<p>there are plenty of threads where its possible to take issue with USNWR.</p>
<p>The implication that because USNWR rankings are faulty, ergo any ranking that contradicts it is worthy of defense, is not logical.</p>