Could it be that H and Y are not tech power houses?
That is part of it. As noted in the thread, engineering deans and faculty ranked H/Y ~30th in undergraduate engineering this year… It seems both engineering deans/faculty and most engineering employers are looking past H/Y’s general prestige and focusing on other criteria. Tech is far from the only field with this pattern.
Yes H/Y are relatively new to engineering, but with the amount of money they can put into and the quality of students they get, how long do you think it will be before they are on par with Stanford? Maybe a decade or two or less?
Thing is, they are already there in science and math, what’s a few more specific engineering courses added to that.
The point was elite IB/consulting hiring is the exception, not the rule. There are numerous other industries that place tremendously less emphasis on prestige and do not hold H/Y in such high regard, including tech.
The Lauren Rivera paper linked in the articles described elite IB/consulting hiring as an old boys network where prestige is the most important factor in hiring. The paper suggests attending H/Y is good for IB/consulting hiring, but not Brown which is “2nd tier”, or Berkeley which is a “safety.” The paper mentions that some hiring managers thought state school grads performed better than H/Y grads who were too focused on theory, but they still emphasized prestige in hiring because they wanted to avoid a risk of hiring someone with intellectual defects or “moral failings” such as “faulty judgment or a lack of foresight on the part of a student”, or considered prestige as an indicator of “polish” including better “social skills and self-preservation abilities”, or considered H/Y grads as having a better potential for future fame and influence for the company that hired them, or validating their own H/Y… educational trajectories. Some also mentioned wanting to avoid hiring “bookworms” and “nerds”, favoring students who do preppy sports associated with a high SES, etc. This is not the standard practice in other industries. It’s also debatable how accurately it describes elite IB/consulting. When the paper has been linked on this forum in the past, posters working in these fields have disputed numerous aspects of the paper.
“The larger classes generally break up in to smaller sections of less than 20, which are run by TAs.”
Ok but a class size of 300 where the lectures are taught by the professor should count as one three-hundred-student class, not 20 classes of 15 students each right? Because then yes, Berkeley would have a ton of classes with less than 20 or less than 50.
“SLAVLANG 1 (first year Russian ): 5 students
SLAVLANG 5 (Russian for native speakers): 0 students
SLAVLANG 181 (fifth year Russian): 2 students”
I will concede that the Slavic Languages Dept will have many if not all class sizes of less than 5.
Yes H/Y are relatively new to engineering, but with the amount of money they can put into and the quality of students they get, how long do you think it will be before they are on par with Stanford? Maybe a decade or two or less?
Yale would have to expand into NYC, NJ to access the technology industries, venture capital (high tech, bio tech) that Stanford can do in the bay area, and I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. Harvard has a better chance as there’s a good tech and financial infrastructure in Cambridge/Boston. And no college is going to match the endowment of Harvard, but Stanford does ok :-).
“Thing is, they are already there in science and math, what’s a few more specific engineering courses added to that.”
Outside of physics at Harvard, what math or science program at H or Y is better than the ones at Stanford? And H/Y had a head start in these fields, so if H or Y overtook them in STEM, it wouldn’t be that hard for Stanford to retake the lead, if you will.
The USNWR ranking uses class size, not section size. Both figures are listed in the CDS, and those values are below:
Stanford Class Size: 35% under 10, 70% under 20, 78% under 30
Stanford Section Size: 51% under 10, 93% under 20, 99% under 30
Berkeley Class Size: 25% under 10, 54% under 20, 68% under 30
Berkeley Section Size: 5% under 10, 26% under 20, 77% under 30
It was an arbitrary example . Major specific courses in nearly any less popular major will show a similar pattern, and there are a lot of less popular majors. Stanford has ~20 majors that have less than 10 undergraduate students enrolled across all class years.
I think an important issue is whether outcome-oriented measurements (or rankings) seem to align with the USNWR rankings (or supporting measurements). Debating the CDS/USNWR data integrity would be much ado about nothing if everyone agreed that your college choice makes no difference at all to career/other outcomes.
Joni Hersch had a sparse data problem. She had to do something clever to find enough graduate students to fill the kinds of groups she wanted to compare (alumni from lower-status colleges and alumni from higher-status colleges who all wound up in high-status grad schools). So she combined Carnegie Classification distinctions with Barron’s Selectivity distinctions and institutional control distinctions. Every college in her Tier 1 is not more selective than every college in Tier 2; every college in Tier 2 is not more selective than every college in Tier 3. However, in terms of the ratio of “Most” to “Highly” competitive schools, Tier 1 > Tier 2 > Tier 3. Tier 4 has only 4 “Most” competitive colleges (out of hundreds). In financial outcomes (per Hersch), Tier 1 > Tier 2 > Tier 3 > Tier 4 (even though all the subjects attended top-tier grad schools, and so were all presumably similar in ability). She concludes (contra Dale & Krueger) that where you go to college can have lingering effects on long-term outcomes, even after controlling for student abilities.
To me, it seems significant that the outcome-oriented Forbes ranking does expose more or less the same set of top colleges as the USNWR rankings. It’s possible, though, that some of the outcome metrics Forbes uses (like PhD production) are telegraphing the admission selectivity metrics that US News uses. Studies like the Hersch paper (or Krueger & Dale) are trying to tease that out. Although their conclusions may not reach a very clear consensus, it does seem to me that in order to measure a very big outcome difference, you need to compare colleges that are pretty far apart in status.
Various posters do make some valid points but overall I think its very clear why parents and students work so hard to be admitted to H/S/Y. It’s not because they have drank the kool aide, are blindly following the list of USNWR, or are obsessed with prestige. The kids are 17-18 years old and at that age no one really knows what the future holds. By attending one of these top schools a student has the widest choices of career options and can chose to try to the enter those few select elite fields that are mentioned in the articles. If you have any aspiration to be an investment banker, venture capitalist, or start up executive, go to a top grad school, or even a tenured academic your chances of being hired,admitted, or getting funding is vastly improved if you attended H/S. Is this fair? Probably not and quite honestly very few students have what it takes to be successful in these elite fields and it is possible to get into these jobs from other schools. However these articles very clearly explain the massive advantages of attending the very elite schools and that parents and students are making a very informed and rational decision to attempt to gain admission. Over and over I see posters making the claim that it makes no difference whether a student attends H/S or Podunk U as long as they get high grades and scores. These articles show just why this is completely untrue even if a student just want to follow a more standard path to grad school.
Perhaps you should start with the question, ‘Is this correct?’ And, as many posts have pointed out, the answer is ‘No’ for all but investment banker, which is one of the very few industries in which prestige matters.
(There are plenty of students at top grad schools from middling- undergrads. And to get a tenured academic job, one only needs a top PhD, at which point, undergrad is immaterial.)
No, but the extreme competition for HYPS and their ilk is from the NE and that is bcos those folks have no highly-ranked public options.
But carry on with your theory.
But why make the distinction on institutional control at all? While some may think that private is always better than public, that is not a general consensus.
If she just wanted a prestige ranking to make tiers, she could have used USNWR ranking or a selectivity based ranking to approximate prestige without clouding it with institutional control irrelevance.
@ucbalumnus
I think her most important distinction is between Tier 4 and everything else. She wanted a principled way to identify a significant number of students in high-status grad schools who arrived there from lower-status undergraduate programs. She had to work with a sufficiently large, searchable data set, and (importantly) with the features marked in that dataset. The NSCG survey data she used “does not report information on specific institutional quality or selectivity”, but does distinguish Carnegie classifications and institutional control, which together appear to be rather highly (although not perfectly) correlated with Barron’s selectivity. Whether she could have eliminated the public v. private distinction without muddying her “competitiveness” waters, maybe by using a different database, I’m not sure.
bluebayou that is your personal opinion and is completely and totally contradicted by the facts. Yes it is possible to get into these fields from other schools but it is a huge advantage to come from H/S. Your statement that all you need to get a tenured academic job is a PhD from a top school has some truth but getting into the top grad school is far more likely from H/S/Y/P and if you read the academic paper I linked they showed that even then the people with the elite undergraduate degree did much better. To test your statement take a few minutes and go through the faculty and check out both the law school and the where they went to college. You will quickly see the pattern. It’s the same at Yale or Stanford and in every academic dept including stuff like art history. The rule of thumb in academics or law and business is that it really matters to go to a top 5 or at least top 10 program. This is a thread meant to help prospective students and their families so it behooves us to post accurate information. Claiming that going to H/S/Y/P isn’t a huge advantage is a disservice to prospective students who need to know the truth. The truth is that in today’s cutthroat world everything is stunningly competitive at every level and that it certainly does help your prospects long term to attend highly ranked colleges. Yes many people do achieve great success from lower ranked schools but that doesn’t alter the fact that attending H/S opens doors for students in ways no other schools can.
https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/?s=15
http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2016/03/how-prestige-shapes-professoriate
Absolutely, it is my opinion. But you consistently fail to point out any facts to support your theory. (Hint: there isn’t any.)
Not sure why you keep posting links about Grad school success, which just reinforces the point that the terminal degree can be critical for academe. (That is a pov I do hold, but others on cc may disagree.)
To make your point, you’d have to have data to show that admission to Grad school is highly dependent on undergrad and I believe that is hard to come by.
And again, Law admission is nearly all about two numbers: GPA+LSAT. Undergrad pedigree is an after-thought to nearly all law schools. Even YLS has students from undergrads outside the top tier. No doubt that YLS has plenty of kids from Yale and Harvard Colleges, but as we noted up thread, these applicants are also among the tippy-top test takers in teh country, in comparison to say, Mount St. Mary’s with its 65% admission rate and <1100 SAT mean.
https://law.yale.edu/admissions/profiles-statistics/entering-class-profile
say, I arbitrarily looked up (or stalked?) the first xx grad students at Yale University’s Psych Department (alpha order). Their undergrads (if reported):
Berkeley
Kalamazoo
New Hampshire
Rochester
Colgate
Washington & Lee
USC (SoCal)
You are correct, I do see the pattern/trend…
bayou as I said you are free to believe whatever you want. I posted peer review articles and studies by academic experts. I have always said many people do well coming from other schools. This in no way refutes what I posted which is that in general going to elite schools is a substantial advantage and that families pursuing admissions to H/S/Y/P are just making a rational decision. As you may know many humanities PhD programs are undergoing a crisis of sorts and Yale in particular has had large amounts of dropouts because the job market is so grim even coming from Yale. Law is a better example and yes you can get into H/Y law school from second tiers schools which send an occasional student but year after year H/Y/S send dozens of students per year to the top law schools. In my son’s class it was filled with such people but yes there were students from lower ranked schools but they tended to be URM’s or students with very special accomplishments. This link is an example. Typical students mostly come from top 15 schools(including top LAC’s) and have near perfect grades and scores.
Most posters look at this the wrong way, its not HYPS or any other elite school that magically produces success. It’s the fact that the applicants are put through a sieve that only a few make it through. These schools have there own methods for choosing applicants who they deem will be most successful in their pursuits. So if you can make it through that sieve you have been identified as someone who has the potential to be very successful in whatever activity they pursue.
CU123 is exactly correct. Employers, grad schools etc use it as a very efficient screening tool. Why look through 100 CV’s of applicants you don’t know. Instead just pick H/S/Y/P and a few others and throw the rest in the circular file. H/S/Y/P will almost always get you an interview or in the door. After that it’s up to the person to produce but don’t think getting in the door is not a huge advantage.
I previously linked to a scattergram showing admissions decisions for Harvard Law School. Looking at the 2 most recent admission cycles, nearly all applicants who had a LSAT+GPA well above the trend line were accepted, regardless of whether they went to HYPSM for undergrad or “Podunk State”. The admissions trend line appears to be approximately GPA + 0.06LSAT > 14.4. Among applicants who were significantly above this GPA + 0.06LSAT > 14.4 threshold, only 2 were rejected – one who attended NYU and one who attended a “top 50 private”. 100% of applicants in the sample who attended a public for undergrad and were well above the threshold were accepted. Among the lowest scoring non-URM applicants who were accepted and provided sufficient detail, only 1 attended HYPSM (2 attended unspecified ivies). A much larger portion attended publics, including ones like Florida State and Alabama.
I don’t doubt that students who attended highly selective Ivies for undergrad are overrepresnted in the H/Y law school class. However, being overrepresented does not mean the group is favored in admissions. For example, it’s common for more than 20% of students at HYP… undergrad to be Asian, even though only ~5% of HS students are Asian. Does this mean being Asian is a huge advantage for admission to HYP? Or does this mean the types of top academic students HYP… looks for occur at a higher concentration among Asian students, and top academic students who are Asian are more likely to apply to HYP than top students of most other races?
It’s a similar idea for law school. Top GPA + LSAT applicants occur at a higher concentration at HYPSM undergrad than at “Podunk State” undergrad. The few top stat students who chose to attend “Podunk State” for a full ride scholarship, location, or not being caught up in the prestige/selectivity hype are likely to have similar considerations when choosing a law school, such as favoring the big merit scholarship at the not as selective law school over paying nearly $100k/yr to attend Harvard Law.
Every general employer survey (not just investment banking + consulting) I’m aware of described a completely different process in which school name as a whole was one of the least influential considerations. I linked to one earlier in the thread that found school name was the least influential consideration when evaluating resumes of new grads in all surveyed industries except education (close 2nd to last) and media, and employers as a whole said they had a slight preference for grads from flagships to “elite” colleges.
Having graduated from HSYP, I know many students that had a very different experience. Even in IB/consulting, which likely focuses more on school name than almost any other industry, this isn’t the case. There are many other factors.