Where ever you look from politics to judiciary to Wall Street to healthcare, collectively Ivy alum seem more successful compared to state schools and lower tier privates, is it because they get smarter students or do they offer something others don’t?
We have had TONS of threads on this forum regarding the value of an Ivy League education…or not.
I hate to say it…but do we have to hash this out…again??
Many ivy grads come from families with connections.
Define successful?
What do you mean by successful?
Adding…there are a LOT of excellent colleges that are not part of the Ivy League. @SugarlessCandy are you suggesting that Stanford, MIT, Northwestern, Boston College, UCLA, UVA, Michigan, OSU, Berkeley, don’t have successful grads?
What about kids who graduate from Colgate, Hamilton, Villanova, Lehigh, Rice…I could,go on and on.
There are successful folks everywhere.
Also, look carefully because some of the successful folks you are mentioning actually got their advanced or professional degrees at the Ivy League schools…not their undergrad degrees.
Biggest reason for success…smart and motivated kids, and excellent recruiting and career centers. Doesn’t matter what school.
Maybe another way to look at it is to find the bios of the people your child admires and look at their origins, including their educations. College is part of the explanation, but not always. Also important are the personality traits of the person. It’s hard to extricate one from the other, what’s driving what.
You left out a lot of schools by categorizing them as Ivy or “state or lower tier private”, you know.
That said, a certain group of elites probably dominate because they’re among the oldest schools in the oldest part of the (new) country. They had lots of time to build their reps with little competition, and then capitalized it by forming an athletic league in which posters on CC think they are one homogeneous mass of awesomeness.
Not everyone considers making big $$$$ their definition of success.
Personally, most Ivy grads I know are doing well financially in life but are otherwise miserable. They don’t like where they live, they don’t have good personal lives, etc. We’re all mid-20s.
But, IMO, this has nothing to do with the schools but with them personally.
OTOH, pretty much everyone I admire doesn’t have an undergrad degree from an Ivy. But I don’t define success by $$$$.
I’m talking about power and influence not money.
How do you define power and influence?
Influence in government, influence in science, influence in . . . . you name it. Literature, journalism (public opinion), fashion??
The schools are great, but I think it has a lot more to do with the type of person who gets admitted to them. Those kids would do well no matter where they went to school.
Look at where those “influential” people went to undergrad school. A LOT of them did not go to Ivy League schools for undergrad.
And anyway…there are a LOT of other schools with influential people represented well.
@SugarlessCandy the message you should be conveying to your kid…do the BEST BEST you can at your college…regardless of which college it is.
And sure…it’s fine to aim high as long as you have a balanced college application list. Because remember…these prestige schools accept 10% or less of applicants.
^^ Agree with @Nrdsb4
Another factor is the connections they make while in school - from the alumni network, to professors on campus, to fellow classmates, to fellow classmates who come to school already with lots of connections
Well, they successfully attended an Ivy league college. Which makes them successful. Even the 2 servers in the restaurant next to my office working for the Michigan grad who owns it.
You may also consider that the media, wall street, and gvmt have their HQ in the middle of Ivy league country and relatively poor public universities compared to the south, midwest, plains and west. Naturally they are focused - some would say obsessed- with their surroundings. 30 inches of snow and 35 below in N Dakota doesn’t make the news, 6 inches in Washington DC is snowmegeddon.
Ivy League schools get a group of smart, talented, motivated students together and teach them well. Of course smart, talented, motivated students will learn and be successful regardless of the school they attend.
I agree with @thumper1 that a parent should not “push” an Ivy school on a student as the odds of acceptance for an unhooked applicant are small and a student can have a great college experience and get where he/she wants to go in life out of many many non-Ivy colleges.
@SugarlessCandy you are going about this backwards. What makes non-Ivy grads successful?
Mods, is it possible to have ONE thread to discuss this topic? This question, or some version of it, has been done to death.
But I will throw these names out. Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln, Richard Branson, Rachael Ray, Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, George Lucas. What do they have in common? They all didn’t go to Ivy League schools. Some of them only went to community college. Some of them dropped out. Some of them didn’t graduate until decades later. There are millions of very successful people who don’t attend those eight colleges. You see what you want to see.
Most of the Ivy grads I know are living pretty ordinary lives. Upper middle class, but nothing out of the ordinary. A sizable handful (that I mostly didn’t know) came from backgrounds that gave them access to the old boys network. A smaller handful (that I occasionally did know) came from very, very modest backgrounds and are doing much better than their families of origin. Some of the happiest grads I know live very modest lives as artists or musicians. I know a surprising number who went into the clergy.
But so much depends on circumstances. An English major who moves to New Hampshire after graduation has far fewer options than one who moved to New York City.