Apropos to this post, my D26’s good friend is at our house this evening. She is headed to one of the Ivys, and has plans to become a teacher. Will be interesting to see if her plans change and the prevailing peer pressure winds at those schools lead her to seek to pursue one of those high earning fields (finance, consulting, etc.) after she gets there.
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Certainly - an Ivy League PhD does not ensure a faculty position at all, much less a faculty position at a highly prestigious university. However, a PhD from a low ranked program makes it difficult to get any sort of faculty position.
Because there is an overproduction of PhDs in so many fields, and because prestige is do important, 70% of all faculty at universities with PhD program did their PhDs at universities which had higher ranks than the university at which they were working. Only 18% of all faculty did their PhDs at universities which had lower ranks than the university at which they were working. The other 11% were self-hires.
That means that the lower the rank of your PhD program, the fewer universities will hire you, and the less likely it is that you will get a TT position. The graduates of the highest ranked programs have the biggest choice and the highest likelihood of being hired.
So, again, attending a highly ranked program doesn’t ensure that a graduate will get a tenure track job, it just makes it more likely.
This is not that common, which is why only 18% of all faculty work at universities that have a higher rank than that of their PhD program. These are all faculty, not just faculty for whom that is their first job.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x
Caveat - the article above only includes faculty at universities with doctoral programs. It does not include faculty at the hundreds of colleges which do not have doctoral programs. These masters universities, baccalaureate universities, community colleges, etc, employ more than 1/2 of all the faculty in institutions of higher education, and it is not clear what effect, if any, the prestige of the PhD program has on hiring. Anecdotally, prestige plays a big part in hiring, but no good peer-reviewed study seems to have been done on that.
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Interesting, D22’s journey so far has gone like this:
- high school –> excited by the idea grad school in the humanities. Also somewhat interested in high school teaching
- freshman fall –> jazzed about the idea of career in the academia/higher ed
- freshman spring –> management consulting career interest
- freshman summer –> internship at big management consulting firm
- sophomore spring —> marketing career interest (because “everyone knows” that “anyone” who goes into a humanities-aligned field ends up broke and miserable)
- sophomore summer –> internship at a different big management consulting firm
- junior fall –> hmm, maybe I want law school or politics or both. Definitely no to consulting.
- junior spring –> I want to do something in finance like “everyone else.”
- junior summer –> internship at a big bank
- senior fall –> last summer’s internship was dull but “everyone” I know wants a finance job so I guess that I do too. Besides I definitely don’t want to go to graduate school or law school. I’m tired of being in school and I don’t know what else to do.
- senior spring –> I want a career in the humanities
So she no longer has any interest in teaching, but otherwise, she seems to have gone full circle over four years, which makes me laugh. My job has been to make supportive noises while (mostly) trying and (mostly) succeeding to keep my mouth shut.
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I agree “high ambition” doesn’t always mean money. “High ambition” is meant the way Chetty et al defined it:
“These schools really are different in terms of propelling a given student into the country’s ruling class. On average, a kid’s earnings end up roughly the same whether they go to Penn or to Penn State. But kids who attend super-elite schools rather than state flagship institutions are 60 percent more likely at age 33 to be in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, nearly twice as likely to go to a tippy-top graduate school, and nearly three times as likely to be employed at a firm like Goldman Sachs or Google. You can become a successful doctor whether you go to one of these colleges or not, Chetty said. “But if you’re talking about access to these positions or institutions of great influence—top companies, top graduate programs, clerkships and so on—there’s a doubling or tripling of your chances. There’s really quite a large effect there.”
That’s a quote from journalist Annie Lowrey. Lowrey’s quote was not an attempt to define “high ambition.”
I’d quibble with some of Lowrey’s interpretation. For example, Chetty’s paper defines “prestigious firm” as firms that have the highest percentage of employees who attended Ivy+ colleges for undergrad. I’m doubtful that Google would meet this definition, given the percentage of Google employees who attended non-Ivy+ colleges like Berkeley, CMU, UCLA, etc. Ivy League colleges lagged behind, particularly in the older sample years Chetty uses.
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Then, at least for me, you may have misinterpreted statements related to not striving to be part of the 1%, as not being high ambition when I went to an Ivy or in my career thereafter. As I’ve said previously, there is a whole prestige path that generally is not tied to the most financially lucrative fields. As a small example, the lawyers who become federal judges through the US attorney/DOJ path often are not high earners compared to their peers due to caps on government salaries. But are often some of the most ambitious lawyers, with federal if not Supreme Court clerkships and other credentials of the same ilk. Similar for some of the academics I know (non- law professors) who are leaders in their field with tremendous influence and who could make more money in private industry. And a MacArthur genius recipient I know who did not go the big money making path. I have done a number of things in my career that most people would put in the high ambition category and highly connected to centers of power, both early on and later in my career.
I’m simply taking Chetty’s statement at face value. And his statement isn’t in conflict with anything you said. So it is no longer clear to me what we’re debating about, and so we can move on.
You can become a successful doctor whether you go to one of these colleges or not, Chetty said. “But if you’re talking about access to these positions or institutions of great influence—top companies, top graduate programs, clerkships and so on—there’s a doubling or tripling of your chances [if you attend an Ivy Plus school]. There’s really quite a large effect there.”
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Happy to move on. In your post I originally responded to in #2, you made a statement and asked a question. I was responding to the assumptions in that statement and question, which directly seemed to dispute, question, attempt to discredit, or something, my earlier statements. But, I will take you at your word that you disagree with nothing I am saying at this point.
To me, the most valuable benefit to attending an Ivy Plus school, assuming it is affordable to your family, is the vastly improved odds it enables you to reach “high ambition” or “fat tail” outcomes, whether defined by reaching the top of the earnings distribution or other non-monetary measures such as getting into elite graduate schools, attaining positions of great influence (leading jurists, politicians, scientists, journalists, etc.), or working at a prestigious firm.
So if you are a “high ambition” 18 year old, then attending an Ivy Plus can really help you with your ambitions. And I have rarely met a smart 18 year old kid WITHOUT high ambitions for their own life. Thus to say to this 18 year old “well, the odds are that most Ivy Plus graduates will never achieve those fat tail ambitions and therefore you shouldn’t believe your Ivy Plus degree will end up meaningfully different than one from your public state flagship school” is an argument I find unnecessarily cynical.
These environments can raise expectations, which can have some negative consequences as well. A lot of pressure, feelings of failure when accomplishments are more average and so on. I read once that happiness lowers as expectations rise (there was an interesting graph). I can’t cite, sorry.
Also an Ivy+ graduate may face higher expectations at work, as well as occasional resentment. Hence the way some will say “I went to college in Boston” when they actually went to Harvard. The impression that an Ivy grad is smart and competent may even lead to more of a work load.
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Absolutely true. Although I have to say that most Harvard grads I come across (and there are a lot where I live) tend to get the fact they went to Harvard into the conversation regardless of the topic.
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I disagree that it’s hidden. I didn’t read all 150 pp of the article, but one can pretty much surmise same thing from reading the summary:
Children from families in the top 1% are twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic ratings, which tend to be higher for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families.
Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%,
Based on my recent experience on this forum, we are all talking about the same phenomenon, the golden ticket chase for Wall Street banking and consulting.
Plus golden tickets for math students entering quant finance and CS students seeking AI roles. Although some people think that Ivy League colleges are not particularly good at the latter, employers disagree.
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How long will the golden ticket last, though (generally, I assume Ivy + grads will continue to have an advantage)? I can’t imagine that AI won’t soon do quantitative finance better and faster than any human. My friends in software (most with MIT/Ivy backgrounds) have witnessed firsthand how quickly AI is taking over tasks —and not just the rote ones.
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It would be interesting if they did a study looking at the top ranked liberal arts colleges and looked at what the differences were. I’m thinking at a minimum, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona, CMC. Would add Caltech perhaps as an MIT analogue and any others I may have missed that should be added. What got me thinking about this is the inclusion of UChicago in the “Ivy-Plus” group. I am no expert on the data, but at least in my circle, it is more difficult for high academics kids to get into many of those schools than U Chicago so long as one is willing to ED.
I am not intending any shade on UChicago, but in my mind it is not in the same category as the others on that Ivy-Plus list. But, more importantly, the LACs I named tend to have a combination of high academics students who wanted an LAC, and students who ended up on Ivy/Stanford/MIT waitlists.
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There are already fewer quant hires today because AI is making people more productive in creating and analyzing models.
But I doubt that quant shops are allowing AI to freely make trading decisions. We have all seen that AI is subject to hallucinations, and letting a wrong trading signal run automatically can sink a company.
I think the number of golden ticket hires is staying relatively constant because while fewer are going into quant, more are going directly into AI jobs (also OpenAI and Anthropic heavily recruit from employees currently working at quant shops).
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I think this uncertainty about life goals is a good point, but it very much cuts both ways IF there is some sort of other cost to choosing the Ivy Plus.
Let’s consider two scenarios.
Scenario A: Ivy Plus gives you enough aid that it costs the same or less as your Quality Flagship. You visit both and you really see yourself thriving at Ivy Plus, are less sure about Quality Flagship. You are also unsure what you will want to do with your life.
Scenario B: Ivy Plus would cost you much more than your Quality Flagship, and your parents are not willing or able to simply give you the difference. You perhaps don’t visit both, or otherwise don’t seriously consider related issues. You are more going off pre-conceived rankings/perceived-prestige. You and your HS peers (and possibly you and your parents) are talking about being super-rich some day.
I don’t think anyone has a problem with the kid in Scenario A choosing the Ivy Plus. I do have concerns about the kid in Scenario B, however. And part of my concern is precisely that I don’t think that kid’s dreams of max-$$$ are necessarily going to hold up as life goals. Indeed, I personally hope for their sake they don’t! But in any event, I know things like that their goals may change. I also know that even if they don’t change, they may not have the opportunities they are hoping for anyway.
And in fact I know sometimes young adults burn out, experience serious stress-related mental and physical crises, alcohol and drug addictions, and so on. And while I don’t think you can entirely avoid that risk with your college choice, I do think financial pressures, particularly associated with debt, raise the risk of those sorts of things happening to young adults.
OK, so yes, in Scenario A, it is “harmless” if that person wants to take these tail effects into consideration. In Scenario B, I don’t agree it is necessarily harmless.
And then of course there are many, many kids who might fall somewhere in between these relative extremes. I don’t intend to be dogmatic about these things. What I do wish, though, is that every kid take very seriously the possible downsides to excessive debt. And I also wish that every kid would also take seriously choosing a college based on whether they really believe they would thrive there. But if they have taken both of those things seriously and then also want to consider these tail effects as an additional consideration, that’s fine with me.
Disclosure: I had a child attend UChicago.
I can’t stand their Admissions director, Jim Nondorf, because IMO he comes across as a used car salesman, and has cheapened the brand with his ED0, ED1, and ED2 crap.
But if we go back to 2016, the last year that UChicago had only EA and RD, it had an admit rate below 10% and a yield in the 60s, about the same as Princeton. And that was with unrestricted EA, something that HYPS were unwilling to do.
So yes, it belongs there. And academically, it’s superb.
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Yes, for the record, I don’t intend to rebut the study at all. I do wish more people would go past what we might call the popular headline findings, and make a point of understanding all their findings, including what you might call null results.
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Oh, I agree that all of these groupings tend to be under-inclusive when it comes to LACs. People who follow the NESCAC discussion forum know who the “usual suspects” are 
NESCAC Spoken Here: - College Search & Lists - College Confidential Forums
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