“the hard part is age 45 plus when YOU NEED A NETWORK to keep employed.”
Have to disagree on this, maybe it’s industry dependent, but your network from undergrad gets less important as you get more experience. Someone who at 45 contacts a classmate 20 years after graduation because they both went to the same elite school is not going to do well wrt getting a new role. However if this person, as happens a lot in high tech, worked with or for, someone who graduated from a state school, that person will be much more important for networking esp if they worked recently together.
"Also some Ivy schools are very politically connected in Washington DC. Do you want to become a US Senator some day? Attending certain schools still helps. "
According to a Washington Post infographic, the ivies do well with Senators, 18% which is very good given their size. However the average ranking of universities attended by Democrat senators is 275, and Republican senators is 317, they don’t use US News but some other one. As ucbalumnus has pointed out, it’s much better to attend a local state college when you’re running now for Congress.
You can always find exceptions to general statements, but at 18% the Ivies have vastly superior numbers for Senators, that is all that was being said, not “every Senator is an Ivy grad”.
You don’t have to go to an elite college for this type of experience. You get out of college what you put into it. I have a relative who graduated from a cc and transferred to a state school. She works at a well known company in Manhattan and earns the same as all the people who graduated from elite private schools. The only difference is she doesn’t have any college loans. There are very few careers where the name of the college matters. Go to your state school and enjoy the experience.
First of all: ALL PhD programs are “fully funded”. The number of lost and lonely souls who decide to do their PhD without it being fully funded by their programs is so small as to be irrelevant. Furthermore, every good R1 university and every good LAC will provide all the advice that a student needs in order to get into a fully funded PhD program.
Now, to a limited extent, for humanities, prestigious colleges provide easier access to the few graduate programs which provide the PhD that are able to get the few TT positions out there, however, this is not really true for Engineering, Math, and Science. Moreover, STEM programs have their own ideas of what constitutes “elite”. An Engineering undergrad from UIUC has far more opportunities and is much more likely to be accepted to top PhD programs than any Notre Dame, UPenn, etc graduate. Carnegie Mellon is at the very top of Computer science, even edging out MIT, while no Ivy even comes close.
To be accepted to a PhD program in STEM has a lot more to do with name recognition of the people writing your LoRs, and with your personal accomplishments, than with the name recognition of your undergraduate program.
In fact, Liberal Arts Colleges are the biggest feeders to PhD programs, and not only the T-20 LACs, but about half of them. Not because of prestige, but, in a large part, because LACs provide a lot more opportunities for hands-on research for undergraduates than research universities, including the Big Name private universities. Students from a LAC can have a couple of publications, and very personal letters of recommendation from their faculty mentors - things which are much more difficult to get in larger universities in which most of the actual research in labs is being done by graduate students and post-docs, and undergraduates are usually relegated to less skilled work, which does not lead to names on publications.
Finally, for engineering, only a minority of the PhDs work in a academia, and most research is not done in academia. My wife’s students, with PhDs from UIC almost all make more money than even the best paid CS professors in the richest universities. Moreover, her MS students are mostly also making a lot more money than most people with PhDs from “prestigious” universities and are still engaged in high level research in the biggest tech companies.
So the monetary benefits of doing your engineering undergraduate in Princeton, and doing a PhD in another similar university which tries and gets its students to stay in academia are questionable.
This is not so different from what is happening in physics, chemistry and much of the biomedical fields. In fact, overall, in academia today, even in the humanities, people with PhDs who work outside of academia make more money and have more job satisfaction than most academics.
The dirty little secret of academia is that the majority of people who get PhDs, including from the most “prestigious” universities, are not getting well paid tenure track positions at “prestigious” colleges or universities. The vast majority are either working as contingent teachers, or getting underpaid tenure-track positions at colleges of which you have never heard, with under-prepared students, little enforcement of standards, and questionable job security, even if they manage to get tenure.
So, in short, to get a fully funded PhD, one does not need to do an undergraduate in an “elite” school, and the one advantage that a graduate of an “elite” college may, perhaps, have, i.e., getting into an “elite” PhD program, is not even a real advantage, since the only “benefit” this has is the an increased chance at one of the least attractive jobs available to people with PhDs.
Finally, the chance of a kid who is accepted to a Harvard undergraduate ending up with a tenured position at a place like Harvard is ridiculously small. Ivies produce about 20x as many PhDs as they hire tenure track positions each year, and the T-20 universities produce about 10X as many PhDs as there are tenure track positions in T-20 universities and T-20 LACs each year.
So to attend an “elite” for the purpose of teaching at an “elite” school is tantamount to basing one’s income on buying a couple of hundred lottery tickets every month.
Will share my oldest son’s fairly unusual story. Average student who went to state flagship. Economics major in the reasonably well regarded business college. Graduated with a 3.5. First employer paid for him to get a terminal master’s. Three years later, because of his MS degree in a niche area, he got all the way to the final round for as associate’s job at one of the top three consulting firms. Down to two people, but he did not get job; was told reason was he did not have a pedigree degree. Angered him a bit. Decided to go get a pedigree MBA. Studied for GMAT for six months, constantly. Scored 80th of the 270,000 test takers that year. Applied to top 10 b-schools. Accepted at all. Awarded his choice university’s (an Ivy) top full scholarship. He had dinner with billionaires who sponsor the 25 scholarships this school awards (top business schools generally do not award merit aid). He was recruited by the top firms in the US before he even started his MBA program. He had the pleasure of rejecting the guy who turned him down because of his lack of a pedigree. Winners of MBA scholarships (he is a presidential ‘fellow’) like to be captured by the big 3 consulting firms for bragging rights.
In school, his fellow students’s parents have last names which are household names. Some professors have served in the White House. But he says that the instruction he received was actually superior in the plain old MS program he attended previously. But he has been jettisoned into a whole different world where CLEARLY the connections are paramount. This bschools create numerous opportunities for the students to develop relationships with students in competitor elite MBA programs.
A couple of his HS friends (both went to Ivy undergrad) went to elite bschools at the same time. They talk a lot and their experiences are similar.
My youngest is grappling right now with deciding between the same state flagship or an Ivy (pending acceptance, of course). They are very different people. Oldest is gregarious and an extrovert. Youngest is opposite. Youngest feels that connections are not something he would value or leverage. Just not his personality. He cringes at his bro’s Stories of extreme elitism and exclusionary practices. He fears he will be so bothered at such a school he won’t be able to be comfortable and do well.
By the way, older brother is imploring his younger brother to attend the state flagship. His point, considering what it failed to afford him? College needs to be fun, too. As A20 turns into a full adult, he needs to be a well rounded person. Our youngest, being so quiet, could spend four years in his dorm room studying if he wasn’t in an environment which naturally encourages socializing and fun. State flagship will do that, Ivy League school is somewhat known for being a bit of a grind. My oldest insists he would follow the same path, given the choice to do it all over again. State flagship is known for being a very down to earth place. True diversity prevails. It is there that my oldest learned about multiple types of people. That, he says, is what he values most in his educational experience, because that is what the real world is like. His job, now, is literally the most coveted job routinely discussed here on CC by the kids seeking a business career. His job is the ‘job no one says no to.’ He claims that the state flagship allowed him to learn how to open his own doors, not have doors opened for him. Yes, doors fly open for him now with his fancy degree, but he says that many others who walk through those doors fail if they don’t have the proper preparation. His job is brutally difficult. And he says what he really needed to learn, he did so in his undergrad years at our state flagship.
Moral of this story? I think I would say that it really is about the student being somewhere which supports personal and academic growth. They BOTH matter.
My oldest achieved nothing through connections. Only his hard work. He didn’t get his current job through connection, per se. He had the chance to be considered via his bschool status, but the recruiting process was absurdly competitive and personally difficult. As a mother I was kind of appalled what they put students through, frankly. My point is it is not like one attends a school like that and opportunities fly at you and you just sit and choose what you want. Once in the door, it is still war to get the desirable slots. He hit the lottery, twice. But paying for those lottery tickets required extreme personal sacrifice, for a long, long time.
It ain’t over, at all, once one is in an elite school. The hard work is just beginning.
@cypresspat But your son got an MBB interview from his flagship. He didn’t get the job because of his performance at the interview. It had nothing to do with the school he went to. He was extremely lucky to get an interview with a 3.5 GPA. Extremely and unlikely to happen again today. But plenty of stellar flagship grads do end up at MBB. Moreover, business school is a different discussion than undergrad. As is law school.
The assumption that it’s a struggle to pay $70/80k a year for college also isn’t true for everyone. I know many full pay families who can afford it without any adverse impact to lifestyle or taking on debt. To each his own…this is another question that can’t be answered because it’s a personal decision.
Too many kids turn down perfectly good scholarships for these schools, or worse, don’t even bother to apply. They end up crippling themselves financially with $150k in student loans. Someone is GIVING you $150k to go to college. NYU and Cornell aren’t giving you anything. You’re getting the privilege of paying them for an overpriced bachelors degree.
The whole “'Bama has as many National Merit Scholars as Harvard” thing is a bit misleading. First of all, Harvard (which last year had 195 to UA Tuscaloosa’s 185) has less than a quarter the number of undergraduates as Harvard. More importantly Harvard does not offer university sponsored National Merit Scholarships while Alabama does. Of the 185 awarded at the Flagship 155 were University sponsored. Most of those kids would not have been awarded a NMS if they had attended Harvard with the same scores and grades.
This comes directly from the NMS Foundation:
In other words, university-sponsored National Merit scholarships don’t just attract National Merit Scholars, they create them.
When I was attending a state school (W&M) 20+ years ago, a Princeton pre-med friend visited me for a few days and lamented that I and my W&M friends had time to talk about ideas and philosophy. She said that she and her classmates were either studying or complaining about studying, and had no time to have the deeper chats she saw us having.
I think the “life of the mind” conversations are available at many schools, and may also depend on major, life approach, the friends you seek out, etc.
OP inadequately refines issue to: Why would one pay $70,000 per year to attend an elite school versus a state flagship with a scholarship ?
Too much missing information. For example, the question should generate different responses depending upon the specific schools involved (Harvard versus the Univ. of Wyoming is quite different from USC versus the University of Texas) and depending upon the actual difference in COA ($70,000 per year for an elite school versus a full tuition scholarship leaving a COA of $15,000) and depending upon one’s career goals (MIT versus the University of Kansas is quite different from MIT versus Georgia Tech or Purdue or Univ. of Washington or Texas).
A more concise question might be: Why would one pay a difference of $55,000 per year to attend a top 50 university versus one’s state flagship university?
Still difficult to offer meaningful advice without knowing the particular schools involved & knowing one’s career goals and family financial situation.
A strong student can find their intellectual peers in many schools, not necessarily elites. Also many schools have top-notch faculty. But the average level of students matters for instruction because professors have to teach the students they have, not abstract students. My son realized he didn’t really want to go to our state flagship (decent but not one of the tops) after he took a math class there (for math majors) as a HS senior and was the best student there by a wide margin. The professor was great but he didn’t have time to cover some material which would have been covered with more advanced students.
Probably should have chosen an honors course, if that was available.
However, it is not surprising that a very advanced-in-math high school student taking a math course at a college is one of the top students in the class. Students who are more advanced in math are generally better at math than students taking math at the normal stage of their school careers.
“You can always find exceptions to general statements”
I’m challenging the actual generalization, 35% of senators graduated from top-50 colleges, so 65% didn’t. Based on that data, not sure why people would think going to a top-50 college will help, in fact the evidence will start to show that it will hurt. Especially when you’re talking about house of representatives and governors, which favors the state school graduate over an elite.
“But your son got an MBB interview from his flagship. He didn’t get the job because of his performance at the interview.”
Exactly - if you get the interview, companies already know what school he attended and his gpa. That was the reason he was told but not the real reason.
Considering that parental financial circumstances and choices are the primary constraint that any college-bound high school student faces, the above statement suggests that much of the ability to attend an “academically suitable” college (or any college) is inherited. Of course, the student still needs to earn his/her way in within those financial constraints, but the financial constraints are the dominant limitation.
Unless the college has heavy and rigorous core or general education requirements (e.g. colleges like MIT, Harvey Mudd, Chicago, Columbia, and UCSD Revelle), a student who was admitted to an academic reach school can typically find some place to graduate in. I.e. a relatively easier major, or a major that happens to be in his/her strongest area, while avoiding courses that s/he would have difficulty in. After all, the elite colleges do need their well-connected development relations, VIP relations, and legacies to graduate, even if they had to relax the academic part of admission standards somewhat to admit them.
To the extent that PhD program admissions in some subjects may be elitist in terms of applicants’ undergraduate schools, they tend to focus on what they think of the department of the applicant’s undergraduate school, rather than the prestige of the overall school.
That, or some other applicant appeared who was either (a) even better, or (b) acceptable (not necessarily better), but better connected. The value of connections for nepotism and corruption in job seeking is likely far greater than the effect of development and legacy in college admissions.
Never assume that an elite private school is going to be generous with financial aid. I’ve seen too many students and parents learn that the hard way. Net Price calculators, I’ve found, are not all that accurate. Private universities have every incentive to give less financial aid to students. If one student rejects an offer because of finances, there’s always another who’s parents are willing to put up the $$. Money is a finite resource. To them, you’re just another smart kid who doesn’t have enough money.
On the other hand, a scholarship is a specific amount guaranteed by contract based on merit or accomplishment.
As others have already said, almost all decent science PhD students are funded by their doctorate-granting institutions – I’ve known hundreds of chemistry and physics grad students, and they were all funded, even those who got their BSs from the directional schools.
Nowadays, everyone knows how to study for their subject GREs. Many many students have excellent summer research opportunities; in my previous life, I supervised the hiring of undergrads for industrial summer research internships for a major pharma firm – and the best interns we ever had came from UT-Austin and UW-something (not Madison, one of the satellite campuses). In my field, it’s the name of your research professor, not the name of your school…and sometimes the best schools aren’t “elite.”