When are they actually worth it financially? Are there only certain majors or careers path for which they actually make a difference, or at the end of the day as long as you are talented does it really matter where you go?
Do employers really care about the school, does it really help you land a better/higher paying job?
Because to me it seems as if no matter where you go to school, you’ll end up getting a similar paying job, and then it’s more important to build up your experience and have success. But there will be one person with 150k+ debt, whereas the other person may be 15k in debt, yet they both are in the same position…
Don’t get in more debt than what you expect to make annually. It’s not worth it for most because the risk is too high. How would you like to live? Working as a security guard with a $30,000 student loan debt or just working as a security guard? Who’s better off? You can still get an education without the debt if you study on your own by using the internet.
@TomSrOfBoston
I get what you are saying but a lot of people who go to non top/prestigious schools aren’t serious about their education and might not be the most talented individuals. But let’s say you have a person going to a decent state school who is super bright, gets great grades, does all the interships/research stuff and excels and then compare them to someone from an ivy league, then what is the difference between the 2?
Especially if you compare someone who builds a great resume at a state school vs a below average student from an ivy league who doesn’t do as good of a job in the real world?
“Wall Street”, which is the financial jobs in NY, Chicago, Houston, and west coast, with very small firms in Boston,
recruits only at certain schools. As I remember, Williams College, in western MA, which is a very old and prestigious liberal arts college, and most of the Ivy League, but ask someone who knows Wall Street today.
High tech firms favor certain schools, so for instance Oracle will only interview at
a very small list of schools, so for the best chance at a job at Oracle, it may be good to go to one of their schools.
In engineering, the top schools are PUBLIC programs, such as U of Illinois, Berkeley, UT Austin, Michigan, U of Maryland as well as the usual suspects in the private realm like MIT , Caltech, Stanford.
This is not a private school/state school divide. If a student attends public Bridgewater State University or private Suffolk University the opportunities available to them will be very limited compared to Northeastern, BU or University of Michigan etc. The school and faculty may not have the connections to help them get internships, research opportunities with faculty will be very limited, the physical resources of the school may not support research etc. Also for a very bright student the competition will be non-existent and they will breeze through.
A body of research exists on this subject. Related research papers and findings have been cited fairly often on CC (including work by Dale and Krueger: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7322). As far as I can tell, a clear consensus has not emerged. The papers I’ve read suggest that, among the 100 or so most selective colleges, where you go makes no significant difference to career earnings, for most students (after controlling for the kinds of qualifications assessed in college admissions). If you’re comparing the most selective colleges with far less selective colleges (e.g. Ivies vs. unranked schools), then there may be significant earnings differences (even after controlling for student abilities).
The papers I’ve seen focus on earnings differences. College choice may make a significant difference to other outcomes that haven’t been researched as well. Roughly half of students at the most prestigious colleges are full pay students from very affluent families. Many of them may not be choosing colleges primarily with career earnings outcomes in mind.
It could make a HUGE difference, depending on your baseline SES. Someone coming from an upper or upper-middle class background could conceivably get away with attending a directional state college because their accumulated human capital (which would include everything from work ethic, communications skills to family connections) would probably carry them forward in life. OTOH, someone who is first gen or from a lower middle class background could disproportionately benefit from the employer/grad school signaling that attending a prestigious college or university confers (and, let’s face it, it probably doesn’t hurt being surrounded by a lot of warm, friendly, high stats kids) along with one added benefit: With generous financial aid, it wouldn’t cost them any more than attending that same directional state college. Bottom line: run the net price calculators on both types of colleges.
@GOAT12 Our kids have been very top students at their very avg universities attending on either mostly or full-scholarship. They have had great professors who have in turn been excellent mentors. They have been able to be involved in UG research on their respective campuses. They have been able to participate in presenting that research at national/international conferences. They have been able to take grad level courses as UGs. And, yes, they have been very competitive for their post-UG objectives.
They have gone on to have excellent careers working right alongside top grads of top programs or attend top grad school programs with top grads of top UG Us.
If you read the link posted in #5, that has been our family’s experience.
In reality, many private schools have significant resources that either aren’t available or as abundant as their public state U counterparts. Whether it be much smaller class size, far better counseling / career services, much nicer facilities, etc. That said, they still require the student to be engaged. They won’t do it for you. You need to do it for you.
As an example, S’s school (small private) has a great business school and places quite well in IB and consulting. Lots of OCR, networking opportunities with alumni, etc. However, they are small and not right next door to a major market so they don’t get all the same attention as a school right outside of NYC. To combat that, they do these “treks” to NYC, San Fran, DC, etc multiple times per yr. Student joins a group, they spend a few days visiting major companies (generally with current alumni working at the company), meet with senior people, get exposure to the real world and make great connections. However, the student needs to attend the meetings, get involved, sign up, join the business clubs that sponsor events, etc. If they are passive, none of these resources matter.
It depends on lots of things- your major, grad/professional school plans (some is just test score/GPA based, but top law schools may be different), connections to job opportunities (friends/family/alumnae networks), etc.Certainly some schools have much better career counseling offices and job fairs, and have more recruiting on campus than others. But its also true that some CEOs attended no-name or directional Us.
Smart motivated people get good jobs because they’re smart and motivated, not because they went to a particular school. If you’re asking if it’s worth paying $250k for a bachelors degree? The answer is no. Is it worth going to an out of state university? The answer is still no.
To go to one of these schools, your parents would have to pay the large tuition or co-sign large amounts of debt over to you. Graduating with $150k in debt is a sure set-up for failure. That kind of debt ruins careers, especially when you decide to get married and start a family. Remember, if your spouse is college educated, you inherit his/her debt too.
If you have the stats to get into an elite school, you can get a scholarship. That’s a much better deal. If someone handed you the keys to a new Honda Accord, why turn it down to pay $80k for a BMW you can’t really afford?
This question is too general. We tend to forget that therr is a bell curve that spreads quality/reputation of colleges into a very wide spectrum. We become obsessed with those colleges in the top 1% (40 or 50 of them out there) even though opening up to say the top 5 or 10% (all schools that make it into Fiske’s book for example) is a much more sensible, wise and reasonable approach.
In almost any prestigious field you chose you will see graduates from say Syracuse working alongside UMaryland, Pitt, Villanova, George Washington, Columbia, Rutgers, Ohio State and UPenn to name a few. It is always a tossup which one ends up in the highest position later in life. Only two of my randomly chosen examples are tippity top school graduates but all commonly gain entry into all sorts of highly regarded places (the most we can aim for really…) and what happens (or doesn’t) to them in the long term has very little to do with their original choice of college.
Graduates from much lesser colleges will also be around but probably in a lower percentage. They may be discriminated against at the door because of real or imaginary reasons (that they are not as prepared) but that is outside the scope of OP’s question I think. If and when a position or opportunity opens up it would be extremely rare that a good candidate that graduated from a recognizable/respected school will be turned down in hopes that someone from a top 20 (or whatever) school shows up later. After the candidate is inside all sorts of dynamics that have absolutely nothing to do with college rankings push and pull people around into status/money/whatever positions.
I appreciate all the answers, I think one point that may help narrow the discussion is let’s say instead of job prospects right out of college for ivy league vs avg schools, how about 2-3 years into the work force?
At that point If you have two applicants applying for an open job, one that went Ivy League and one who went to an average college will the school they went to matter as much as their job performance during those 2 to 3 years working? Especially if the applicant who went to the average college still did really well during school and had much better performance during those few years working versus the ivy league applicant?
