<p>Momlive,
Watch out-- longprime will soon be asking you if you or your relatives have eligible daughters for his son :D</p>
<p>I totally agree with all yhour points. I also think that if the economy were not so lousy things might be a bit different. I think that schools are getting fewer job scouters from the big name companies (specialty areas like engineering aside), and that will affect the upcoming college grads.</p>
<p>There is also a difference between someone not going to an elite college 35 years ago versus now. Back in the age of the dinosaurs when there were no cell phones and people didn’t regularly fly anywhere with any frequency, fewer people ventured far from home for college. Not one of my high school classmates from PA went to school farther south than VA, farther west than Ohio, or farther north than CT, and kids usually only went out of state to school if they had family nearby the college. The vast majority stayed in PA. In contrast, my children’s classmates have gone all over the country, and also to Canada. Also, back then a college degree was enough to practically ensure a job. Now one needs more of an edge than that.</p>
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<p>I think that is socioeconomic more than anything. 25 years ago, my affluent public high school sent kids in Missouri sent kids <em>everywhere</em> – because the parents had the means to stick their kids on planes to Boston or San Francisco or wherever and not think twice. Now, my kids’ less-uniformly-affluent high school – in a larger and ostensibly more sophisticated metro area – sends most kids within driving distance and very few are a plane ride away. I don’t think it’s so much 25-years-ago-vs-today as it is the socioeconomic circles under consideration.</p>
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<p>If you go to an elite law school, you have as much chance as anyone else regardless of undergrad education.</p>
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<p>I’ve also taught for 20 years. At a tippy top school, an Ivy, another highly rated private, and now a big public in the top 15-30 (depends on field) in the world. </p>
<p>While I agree absolutely that not all schools are equal. But I would like to add that I also believe that the real differences between a “ivy” and other well regarded academic institutions are ridiculously overrated and simply not valid. I would not encourage my kids to go to quite a few State Us that will go unnamed, but at the same time, I would have nary a concern that they would get a very rigorous, excellent education at a boat load of great schools that are not ‘dream schools’ on CC. I’ve likewise witnessed from my own firsthand experience, and working in my field, that many many extremely successful scholars started out at schools that are not elite schools. You most definitely can not tell who went where for just undergrad.</p>
<p>^^ True Collegealum314. But look at the class profiles at Yale and Harvard law school. They are filled with elite college grads in a strongly disproportionate fashion. Maybe they apply in much greater numbers since those attracted to “prestige” in college seek the same in law school. Maybe these kids who aced the SATs are so much better than state flagship grads on the LSAT. Maybe they are truly advantaged in the admissions process. Without better data on GPA/LSAT scores broken down by UG institution there is no way to know but the correlation between HYPS undergraduate and HYS law school is very strong.</p>
<p>YaleGrad/Dad- What happens with a lot of lawyers (especially the 99% that aren’t interested in Wall Street/NY power firms) is that if they have gone to a state university, or even if they haven’t but want to go “home” and live in a particular state, they might just decide on their state university law school. This is smart economically and for making contacts. They might have friends/contacts from undergrad who will likely remain in the state, too. A lot of the law firm lawyers I hired as an in-house counsel in Texas had gone to state schools/law schools and were at top regional firms.</p>
<p>I just noticed the typo in the thread title.</p>
<p>^^ It’s been driving me crazy.</p>
<p>^^^
My brain automatically translated it to what I thought it should be. I saw an exercise somewhere in which every other letter in a message was a typo and people could still understand the message.</p>
<p>^^
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.</p>
<p>[Word</a> Scramble](<a href=“http://reggietull.hubpages.com/hub/WordScrambled]Word”>http://reggietull.hubpages.com/hub/WordScrambled)</p>
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<p>I’m not an expert in law school admission. However, I do know there is a very strong correlation between grades/LSATs and admission–so much so that law schools publish a 2-d grid of % admitted with grades on one axis and LSATs on the other. Admission is so tightly correlated with those to measures it is hard to believe that another factor (such as undergrad prestige) could have much influence.</p>
<p>My view of the value of the ‘elite’ university in terms of opportunities is that going to an elite university is like being placed in the middle of a tower with corridors going out radially from where you stand. One step in any direction and you will start out at the highest entry-level rung in a given profession. </p>
<p>You can still get there with a state university degree but it might require a bit more work. For instance, you might need to do an internship during undergrad to have a good chance of getting a position with a given company whereas the Harvard grad with a decent academic record would just need to apply. For this reason, a lot of changes in career direction during college might be best done at an elite university. In some cases, the effect of the elite degree is negligible or easily trumped with talent. For instance, get a 90% GRE subject test score with comparable grades plus a publication (not particularly difficult,) and it’s likely you will get in every grad school you apply. (In fact, you would have a strong chance with a 70% GRE subject score in some science fields.)</p>
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<p>Actually, I’d argue that Bill Gates did need Harvard to succeed. Microsoft’s first product was developed on Harvard’s computers while BG was a student. I’m only a few years younger than him, and at my university, students in a class that required it would get an allocation of CPU time for the semester that was usually enough to do the class projects, but not much else. Other uses of computer time cost real money–faculty members needed grants to pay for it. So, if BG had gone to a typical university like mine instead of a rich, well-resourced place like Harvard that could give undergrads plenty of computer time to work on their own personal projects, Microsoft would have had a much more expensive and difficult birth, if it happened at all.</p>
<p>^^^
My impression was that Gates didn’t really make any real money off programming until he left Harvard, and modified someone else’s operating system and sold it to IBM. THat was after a couple years programming hobbyist stuff in New Mexico.</p>
<p>^ ^</p>
<p>The story goes is that he paid someone in Washington State $50,000 for the rights to a variant of Dos which he and a few associates modified and licensed as MS-DOS…which started Microsoft on the road to OS dominance and technological domination. </p>
<p>Moreover, contrary to popular belief…Bill Gates’ greatest innovations wasn’t in computer programming or technology<em>, but in business and marketing concepts.</em>*</p>
<p>I have no doubt that his association with Harvard helped him…considering it brought him together with key Microsoft associates. </p>
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<li>If you mentioned that to most hardcore engineering/CS graduates working in the computer industry with the notable exception of Microsoft…such expressions of popular belief would either be met by scornful laughter or anger at the perceived insult of being associated with Bill Gates/Microsoft. To them…his strengths are more along the lines of the scorned MBA “suits”…not those of a “real engineering/CS techie”.<br></li>
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<p>** Licensing of software on a massive scale.</p>
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Some associates. Of course, I think Paul Allen was at UW at the time, telling him to quit.</p>
<p>Microsoft’s first product was a Basic interpreter for an Altair 8800, which was written by Paul Allen and Bill Gates using Harvard computers. Obviously, they didn’t get rich off of this particular product, but they were able to establish a company that had some credibility later when IBM decided to let Microsoft provide the OS for the PC. While a Basic interpreter isn’t rocket science, they were among the first, if not the first, to implement one for such a small computer. Most undergrads then and now wouldn’t have had a clue how to do it. They did because they had a lot of programming experience from high school (where they benefitted from going to a private school that provided them with access to computers that was hard to come by back then.)</p>
<p>I think those “hardcore engineering/CS graduates working in the computer industry” who display “scornful laughter or anger at the perceived insult of being associated with Bill Gates/Microsoft” have a problem. It is usually called sour grapes. (This is not to say that I’m thrilled with all MS products or business practices, but “scornful laughter or anger” is a bit much.) MS Research is full of very smart and innovative “hardcore engineering/CS graduates” although Google is considered to be a cooler place to work now.</p>
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<p>I know…know several who work for both of those companies. </p>
<p>However, that perception is widespread in many engineering/CS graduate heavy workplaces…especially considering the quality of some of their past products(All versions of Windows up to and including Vista.) and perceptions Microsoft’s product release schedules are dictated mainly by "suits/MBA marketing considerations rather than whether the product had been thoroughly checked to avoid serious bugs affecting basic functionality.*</p>
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<li>I.e. Data corruption from copying a gig or more worth of data from one folder to another on same hard drive or across the network which necessitated a large service pack to fix and prompted many institutional users to postpone “upgrading”. A bug that IMO…should have been caught and corrected before being released to the public.</li>
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<p>Didn’t Gates’ mom have some sort of affiliation with IBM? I thought I read or heard that someplace.</p>