Do elite schools matter? One man's story (long)

[editrix]

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@idler

Another point of view, rarely heard on these boards, is that choosing a college is not all about which will be the highest trump to play when applying to professional school, or which college will yield the best-paying job. Surely there is more to it than that.

@aparent5

What I would want to know about Yale, in order to determine whether it “mattered,” is whether your husband’s experience there has had an impact on his leisure time, his concern for the wider world, his avocations. I have always told my kids that you don’t attend a school like that in order to be successful, but in order to be interesting and engaged with the world. I know lots of successful people from various colleges and universities. It does seem to me that those who come out of schools that could be described as an intellectual banquet (and these are not just the Ivies, of course) tend to have very rich lives in their off-hours, reading extensively, writing, traveling.

Thank you, Idler and Aparent5, for bringing up another point that my husband and I have been discussing. When we were at Yale, the then-president, Kingman Brewster, gave a famous speech lamenting the “grim professionalism” of the growing “herd instinct for law and medicine”; he urged us to take full advantage of the richness of Yale’s offerings for their own sake–not because they would look good on our resumes.</p>

<p>Both my husband and I did so, and while his forays into interesting but not strictly pre-med subjects probably didn’t help him with med school admissions in a tough year, he says that they were well worth it.</p>