<p>ivy league attendees are usually a self-selected crowd. we can say, on AVERAGE, that the people at harvard are smarter and work harder than the people at your state flagship university. therefore, these people seem to on average succeed because intelligence and hard work are two of a few necessary ingredients for success.</p>
<p>in addition, an ivy-league name-brand education would get more consideration from employers, again, on average, because employers know that these schools have the best students and have gotten a great education at these schools. therefore, an ivy league education will probably get you started higher on the corporate ladder (or whatever you field you’re going into), and from there, it’s pretty much your experience and who you are that keeps you going up the ladder. starting high, is important in that you probably don’t need to do as MUCH work (altho still a lot) to climb even higher, but those people who graduate from not-so-famous schools do need a “hook” to get them going and the people with hooks are rarer.</p>
<p>however, this also depends a lot on what field you’re going into. if you’re going into law, a good graduate law school will help you a lot more than a law degree at just any other college, since now there are way too many lawyers. in addition, business is also a field that having a degree from a good name school will help you at the beginning. contrarily, a degree in something like history does not seem to have as big of a difference in terms of job opportunities, starting salaries, etc, simply because there aren’t many in the first place, and how high can salaries go with a history-related job?</p>
<p>keep in mind that this is all on average, there are many exceptions to the rule. people aways point out that with the top CEOs in the country, only about half of them went to top colleges. the truth is, the top CEOs would probably have gotten where they are no matter what education they had, because i’m sure they all had something going for them that would’ve made what college they went to unimportant. And half of these people did go to state schools and unknown schools. However, of these dozens of people in the world that we know of, there are thousands more that don’t succeed.</p>