@Empireapple - While I agree with your point about debt, I don’t agree with your point about ‘ridiculous majors’. There is great value in learning how to write clearly, persuasively and succinctly, to apply critical thinking and analysis in work situations and be able to stand up in a conference room and deliver a cogent presentation or sit across from someone at a conference table and successfully present a point of view. These are valuable skills which a liberal arts education delivers. Not saying it is better or worse than a pre-professional education, but it certainly is not ‘bs’. I’ve worked wth a lot of kids coming out of college and many have very limited communication skills, (unless you want to count social media) and would have benefitted greatly by some liberal arts classes.
First, I don’t get your point about “ridiculous majors”. Second, I disagree. Look at top schools’ published outcomes reports and you’ll see students with all kinds of majors such as history or English or Gender Studies or classics, etc. going to work at investment banks, consulting firms, places like google. That’s not to say they all are - heck, many don’t want those jobs - but enough are that it is not an anomaly. Employers want graduates with good critical thinking, research, and writing and communication skills, something strong colleges deliver. College doesn’t need to be viewed as a trade school.
@Empireapple Your personal bias is skewing your perspective. Results prove otherwise. But, yes, good outcomes also occur at non-Ivies, of course.
I also dispute the notion that students at less prestigious schools don’t learn critical thinking, writing, and other liberal arts hallmarks. Every school requires a liberal arts core for all majors. Big public STEM and small private business students still have to take plenty of liberal arts classes.
“@northwesty prestige = selectivity = high test scores ?”
Prestige is pretty much what Groucho said – everyone wants to be a member of the club that wouldn’t have them as a member. Which means primarily admissions exclusivity/selectivity.
High test scores are one way to measure it. But as us CC-ers know, the true-est measure of Groucho Marx-style prestigiosity is the good old YTAR – yield to admit ratio.
That one ratio pretty much captures it all – (i) how hard it is to get into the club, and (ii) how many people accept the membership if offered. I haven’t seen any other metric that so perfectly identifies the collegiate Augusta Nationals and Cypress Points.
Top four YTARs for 2020 – Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton.
QED.
: )
Late to the admission-certificate party, but in 1976 Dartmouth did send out fancy certificates of admission. But they folded it in three, like a business letter, which would undermine the framing effort. Harvard, otoh, knew better, and left theirs flat.
“UCSF is an amazing university for medicine and research!! It has a number of Nobel Prize winners. I think maybe people haven’t heard of it because it doesn’t have an undergraduate program. I would say it rivals or beats Stanford in many areas. It’ is no “sacrifice” of prestige.”
Agree. I know of several people who chose UCSF medical school over HYS medical schools, especially among CA residents who get in. Because they pay instate prices for quality and reputation on par with the top privates.
But aren’t those places (investment banks, consulting firms) some of the specific examples of employers that are school-prestige-conscious in recruiting and hiring? In that sense, a high-prestige college can be thought of as a trade school for that kind of employment.
Regarding Google, it recruits a lot more widely (apparently hundreds of colleges) than most people on these forums seem to assume.
@ucbalumnus I never said prestige wasn’t a factor plus my response was directed towards a particular post that was was discounting both highly ranked private schools and “ridiculous majors” more than a response to the thread topic as a whole. Here’s a refresher of the post I was responding to:
"Frankly I think prestige is changing in today’s world. The jig is up…people in the real world are onto the college B.S. and ridiculous majors. Learning for the sake of learning and going to a name school has changed (for better or worse). Now, it is about staying out of debt while getting a great, practical education. Employers know this and want real people with real skill and work ethic. Most of this board is obsessed with getting into name schools but in the real world, there is so much more that matters. Down the road I’ll happily compared the kid who went to a public institution and got an applicable degree for real life to the kid who went to a name school and got a degree in women’s studies or the classics (etc.). "
The best CEO I ever worked for was a Renaissance Studies major. There are brilliant and talented people in the real world (yes, today’s world) who majored in history, Classics, Women’s Studies, and are incredibly successful-- and there are dopes who majored in the same, AND dopes who majored in the practical fields.
It is ludicrous to tar any major you personally don’t approve of with one brush. And applicable for real life? Do some digging. Thousands of kids were majoring in “ecommerce” in 2001 when the tech bubble burst. Bet a few of them wish they’d majored in history. Tens of thousands of aerospace engineers were let go in the mid-90’s when the aviation industry moved off-shore. Bet a few thousand of them wish they’d majored in ANYTHING besides aerospace engineering.
Industry is cyclical. If you are smart enough to predict the cycles, you don’t need to be on CC giving advice to strangers- you can sit back on your yacht and tell the captain that you’re tired of the Maldives and want to see Palermo before it gets too hot.
“Real life” and “success” come in different flavors.
Brilliant young friend of ours attended tippy-top school for undergrad, majored in classics. Moved on to another tippy-top school for classics PhD. Is now at yet a third tippy-top school for a long-term fellowship. They’d like to keep our friend; friend may stay or may decide to accept another tenure-track position. It’s blindingly clear that our friend is well on the way to an exceptional career in academia. That’s our friend’s REAL life.
Yes, there are going to be very few classics professors. But there are going to be some. I’ll happily compare our friend with the kid who went to a public institution and got a degree with an “applicable to life” major.
"Industry is cyclical. If you are smart enough to predict the cycles, you don’t need to be on CC giving advice to strangers- you can sit back on your yacht and tell the captain that you’re tired of the Maldives and want to see Palermo before it gets too hot. "
Blossom is on fire.
And there are Classics majors who DON’T go into academia and do completely fine as well. 
^We may be getting off topic, but there’s no question the differences in means and standard deviations of income between majors is statistically significant. Further, differences in mean incomes between majors are relatively stable over time. The Hamilton Project should have put that debate to bed. Now, to circle back to the original discussion it’s possible the difference in earnings between CS majors and history majors at Harvard is much smaller than the differences you would see at your average state U.
Oh, I hope this doesn’t go long into some parsing of stats and the one on one arguments that usually ensue here. That’s as frustrating as insisting you can’t succeed unless companies actually recruit on your campus. Lol.
Drives matter. Young adults aren’t permanently pigeonholed by their UG school and major. The exception is some careers that require certain training.
I think this is an important point. A Classics major or an English major at Yale or Penn or Princeton will be much better situated than students with those majors at, say, Central Michigan University. Whereas a computer science major who wants to work in IT will do well if he/she is good at the SKILL of computer science.
Any classics major doesn’t necessarily have any intent on working in classics, post grad, whether from Yale or Central Mich. I’m amazed at the variety of careers my kids’ hs peers have embarked on, well paying. Not stem or business majors. A range of colleges. The world runs on many talents.
@WalknOnEggShells if you really think the “prestige” thing matters, have your kid take a page out many CA kid’s book. Go to a less expensive school (often a CC out here) for 2 years, apply themselves. Kill the GPA. Transfer to someplace fancier. Same diploma 1/2 - ok, maybe 3/5th the cost. Or while Kiddo is at UG school, sneak a few more bucks in the saving account, and when they get out (early, if they can) have them grab an accelerated masters at a fancier U. The last degree is the name that 'counts"
I don’t think it’s a big deal - what they kid does in the college career is much more important. But there are little things you can do if you think it’s important. Trying to change the world view in 4 years is probably not the most efficient of all the startegies.
Accenture and Google are two companies that love Classics majors. And foreign language majors too. From experience, I hate interviewing Econ majors (and I’m one). They tend to drone on and on. Conversely, I’ve had some fascinating discussions with students who majored in languages or Classics. And hired them too.
I majored in Classics so I will refrain from commenting on that specific discipline.
But for a minute pretend you are the CFO of a Fortune 500 company. Your company has a well respected rotational program for new grads (2 years of different assignments in various finance functions before getting staffed in a permanent role).
Your “problem of the week” happens to be that last year you imposed a cap on procurement spending in non-strategic areas (i.e. if you make cars, the cap would apply to any component or service that doesn’t end up in the car). And yet you notice that spending on Legal (internal and outside counsel) went up 15% despite the cap.
So you hand the problem off to your managers in a couple of different departments and tell them to come back to you in a week with the answer- why.
Now your managers have to put together an emergency SWAT team to dig through the numbers and get back to the CFO with the answer. Do you want an accounting major on the team? For sure. So get yourself one of the analysts in the rotational program with an accounting degree. But do you ONLY want accounting majors on the team? probably not. This isn’t likely an accounting problem-- it’s psychology, it’s drama, it’s epic poetry, it’s linguistics and semiotics. You need some detective work-- someone who is trained to ask “what happened here”-- maybe a history major who also understands numbers? Yep. You need someone who can quickly program in one of the major statistical programs and can evaluate the findings- perhaps historically when the company’s spending on legal jumped, so did spending in a couple of other areas, and what are those correlations? So pull in someone with strong statistical training- a poli sci major or math major. But you also need someone who can quickly conduct interviews with the heads of the various teams in the General Counsel’s office- and establish trust and get inside their heads- what happened, how did they circumvent the spending freeze- so maybe someone with a degree in psych to design the interview questions for maximum cooperation?
And this team is going to present a series of findings which are more robust than just “we went through the general ledger and all the coding was correct. We don’t know why spending went up but it did”.
This is why folks get all upset when their kid who majored in X “practical major” doesn’t get a job and the kid next door who majored in psych or poli sci or history does- the problems that people have to solve in a big company are rarely as straightforward as “here’s the numerator, here’s the denominator”. And so accounting is great. Finance is great. And so are another two dozen disciplines. And of course being able to write the 2 page executive summary, the 10 page report, and then assemble the 40 page appendix with pivot tables in a way that clarifies, not confuses. Being able to write- that’s key.
I have a neighbor who is still complaining that her kid with a degree in communications did not get a highly prized entry level job at one of the major TV networks- it went to a history major. “What does he know about communications” she asks.
D1 was also classics (the full degree includes some related fields) and works in what I call semi-tech (for a startup, if it matters, her second since grad.) Blossom, not even great math in college. But she can observe, think, process, analyze, and project. Strong people skills. The example given was big business, big issue. But plenty of companies out there need the kids who can think and act, move the business forward.
I told her, all along, that the money (and satisfaction in a role) follows the skills and willingness to work hard, work smart.
This notion it has to be this college or that major is terribly limiting. It misses what really can propel one, in their generation and, in many respects, in ours.
Fairfield was on her GC’s radar, as D1 knew she wanted classics. (I suppose V could have been; many Catholic schools do classics well.) Didn’t pursue it, aimed differently. But the individual, the drives and energy are the constant. Not just meeting the minimums or what the ink spells on the diploma.
If we can’t think that way, how do we encourage them, in today’s world?