But wouldn’t your first job determine the kind of work experience you bring to the job hunt for job number 2?
I get that prestige is just one factor. I am asking about it because it doesn’t matter at all in my field, and wasn’t a factor for my first kid, so it’s something I am trying to wrap my head around, not because I think it’s the be all and end all. I know that there are parents who think prestige is everything, my kids go to school with their kids. Their Dad might think prestige matters more than I do, but he also values all sorts of other things, including his kids’ happiness.
But I don’t really understand the logic of “it only matters for the first job”. If you have one kid who graduates from Williams and goes to work at some well known bank, and the other kid graduates from Unknown school and ends up not finding a banking job and working as a barista, then the experience and accomplishments they bring to their next position would be, in part, determined by that first job. No?
I feel like this thread has addressed which careers are most populated with grads from highly rejective schools: IB, MBB, quant analyst/trader
Non-IB banking jobs, corporate finance jobs, accounting jobs, cyber jobs…don’t need a prestigious school diploma.
If in 9 months or so, he still wants a relatively small school that has all the majors of interest…well, that’s going to be a fairly small subset of schools if you include accounting and cyber. That could be ok, pending any affordability issues.
I assume this is one of the twins you have posted about previously, so budget is going to drive the list, not prestige, unless you qualify for enough need based aid at some of the generous schools (and whether this kid has the academics and test score for these schools/jobs.) There will be added complexity if this is the trans twin, which seems to be the case…that would knock some of the schools above off the list.
IMO, a student who you said doesn’t love the academic part of school is unlikely to be targeting elite jobs like IB, MBB, or quant roles…where recruiting for those will start the summer after freshman year. I’m saying this gently, yet realistically.
With that said, I don’t know his grades/rigor/test score or much about his personality, especially with regard to networking, and of course students can change/grow a lot during the college years, but the short opening to those careers will quickly be upon him.
If you say it like this yes - because you want to leave everything on the table.
So for 99%, not so much. But if you want access to 100%, then yes.
I demonstrated above why not for accounting and it will be similar jobs likely across the board.
But if you want to leave nothing off the table, than a name matters. But even kids at those don’t schools don’t necessarily get those jobs. They just have better access to them. And there are kids at the less prestigious names that get those jobs but may need to know someone or likely have to work much, much harder to do so.
Prestige has a (small) lifetime effect, definitely not limited to the 1st job. I base this on seeing my Harvard graduate spouse’s lifetime experiences.
But the kid who went to Williams will have to work the Williams connections pipeline while an undergrad to get the internships that they need, and that first offer. They won’t have simply done nothing, and then, after graduation, submitted applications with their Williams degree on the apps.
OTOH, the person who got an accounting degree at a less-prestigious college, but in the area of a big accounting firm, might have been able to snag an internship during college at a big firm, because they were local and could do something ongoing, throughout college, and might wind up getting a job at that big accounting firm, because they were now a known quantity.
Exactly, the career center won’t be driving the process. My D went to a Williams peer, and had very little help from the career center. She wanted IB and starting spring of freshman year had completed nearly 100 networking conversations, and participated in several of the selective programs the big banks run. She had secured a post soph year internship and post junior year internship by the holidays of her soph year.
OP- in my opinion- developed after 35+ years hiring people for mostly large corporations, there is no one-size-fits-all answer.
What the “prestigious” type schools offer is a higher degree of optionality (in my opinion). Whether that will matter for any particular kid is a question. Students who major in Psych or Anthropology at the “highly rejective” schools are likely to be considered for business roles at some companies whereas their counterparts at the “less rejective” schools have fewer on-ramps.
Will it matter to your kid? Who knows. He may love his macroeconomics class or hate it. He may love statistics (pretty essential for a business major, no matter where) or decide he wants a less “mathy” track. Lots of kids who think they want to “go into business” discover something they love more-- and lots of kids who start out in an entry level business role realize they hate it early on.
I think the other considerations your kid has will likely become more important as the search progresses. Or not. But to figure out “will my HS kid decide he wants to work in Private Equity” (a very prestige-oriented field) is really not a productive query right now.
Does he love math? That’s important for some business roles. Is he a natural friend-maker/people engager? That’s important for other, different types of roles. Does he love tech and love to “geek out”? Does he like to solve puzzles, play poker, chess?
I am not a fan of worrying about the “competitive clubs”. First, because while they are helpful, they do not define the pool. Many, many kids get hired into consulting and I-banking roles without ever stepping foot into one of these club meetings, despite what the President of the highly prestigious I-banking club tells fellow students. Case prep can be found online these days. And there is not a single “esoteric” concept or algorithm that a kid cannot find with a simple google search. And second- because there are only 24 hours in a day. Your kid wants to work with the dining hall to eliminate single use plastics on campus? That’s a fabulous EC, pretty time consuming, involves a LOT of very relevant business skills, and a lot more impactful in an interview or on a resume than “Was a member of a case prep club”.
So the kids that are clawing over each other to get in to these competitive clubs- imagine all the hours they are spending “gunning” instead of doing interesting and impactful or fun stuff on campus! Join the swing dancing club. Teach a 7th grader how to code. Get a job fact-checking a professor’s article for a scholarly publication. Work as a “cater-waiter” in the alumni center- you’ll meet MANY more C-suite executives that way than you will in a business club!
The NESCAC non-athletes who are exceptionally good at time management are the ones to watch. IMO, this is a largely self-selected group who
Chose their schools primarily for the academic opportunities.
Are open to changing majors,
and,
As a corollary of #2, often figure out how to design their own interdisciplinary or double-majors that help narrow their focus and define who they are.
Is that superior to attending a LAC where nearly half the students are studying job-specific majors? I’m not gonna go that far. I will say that it is wishful thinking that the campus culture won’t be completely different at such LACs. Greek life will be more ever present; the science faculty won’t be as strong; theater and dance productions won’t be as robust.
I suspect these are among the reasons OP’s husband feels they are less “prestigious” than the NESCACs
Can you elaborate a bit on the fit concern? Like I personally think places like Georgetown, Fordham, Santa Clara, or so on can be great for non-Catholics and in fact non-Christians and non-religious kids. And they otherwise have a lot of the same appeal for undergrads as LACs or unaffiliated private research universities.
Which doesn’t mean there is no possible issue, but nothing immediately leaps out to me based on the other things you have said so far.
In any event, my main point is thinking in terms of how much generic prestige matters for business careers is probably not that helpful, but thinking about networking in a far more detailed way could be clarifying about what options really make the most sense for a given kid.
I’m a little confused by this statement. Most LACs are small schools. So is Dad saying go for LAC, but target only LACs with strong name recognition, not those with low name recognition?
IMHO every factor should be weighed relative to what the student is like. Based on what you’ve written about your son, my vote is to downplay prestige. I’m not in finance/econ but I hire PhD’s and prestige plays a low role when I’m considering applicants. You mentioned cybersecurity as a possible field for your son. I’m not in that field but I’d say prestige will be a negligible factor for that field.
I guess that is one of the questions I am still trying to figure out. For his brother, who wants to be an engineer it seems obvious that if you want to be an engineer the very first question you ask is “do they have engineering majors?” Same for his sister who is studying to be a nurse. For both of them, if we were curious about a school, we opened the website and went directly to the list of majors. If nursing or engineering wasn’t there it didn’t go on the list.
But it seems as though for the things he thinks he might be interested in, it’s not that simple. It seems like you can major in computer science and end up in a cybersecurity, or get an Econ degree and go to grad school for accounting. On the poets and quants list of top schools for IB, many of them don’t even have undergrad business majors.
So, my gut feeling is that while we will look at majors for this kid, it won’t be the driving factor.
Affordability is a factor, but from looking at NPC’s, and his sister’s experience, I think he’ll have a fair number of options. All of the meet needs schools will be affordable, as will many of the schools that award merit. Fit is going to be super important for him, and so we do feel fortunate that we’ll be able to help with that.
Yes, this is my son who is trans. Honestly, what I learned from the last thread about him was that bringing that up completely derailed the conversation.
I’m not really sure I understand what you’re saying. He does well in school. He works hard. He has good grades in a rigorous school and high test scores. But if you asked him what his favorite things are about school, his answer wouldn’t be “learning X”, it would be friends, or activities, or sports. I don’t know what that has to do with being recruited after freshman year.
I’ll also say, I have no idea what people in those jobs even do, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t either, so I’m not saying he is going to want them.
I think being able to switch majors easily is important for a kid who is undecided. I think finding a college where exploration is encouraged and “built in” to the model is important. I think the quality of Career Services (not just “can they place me into I-banking” which is so many kids focus) in helping with a really wide variety of professional avenues is important. And I think finding a college which emphasizes an inter-disciplinary approach (so many fields are inter-disciplinary now, despite parents insistence on “The major will dictate your life’s choices”) is important.
So you bring up cyber. A relatively new field. You can get there with an applied math major. You can get there with CS. You can get there with electrical engineering. You can get there with public policy/poli sci. You can get there with Cog Sci. So being able to sample courses in all these majors- without having to “switch” out of math (usually in the School of Arts and Sciences) into engineering is going to be really helpful.
Accounting is pretty straightforward, but anyone interested in forensic accounting (a very cool sub-field) would be well advised to develop fluency in a foreign language. And taking psychology would be really helpful.
Etc. I don’t know any corporate leader who isn’t helped by having had as broad an education as possible.
If IB was the thing and you believe one of the several sources out there - this one is College Transitions, here is a list per capita of top schools for IB.
Yes, they show Amherst, Williams, MIdd, but also W&L and then small business schools - Bentley and Babson.
We shouldn’t assume that IB is some default assumption for a kid that is described as not academic. That area requires 90-100+ hrs / week, and kids burn out. I know kids who have a sibling in IB and who explicitly said no IB for themselves as a result. There are many parts of finance that are not IB, and that many kids like.
I 100% agree but OP continues to go back - does prestige matter and as I’ve shown with data (salaries from various schools - ranked and not), it’s unlikely to matter, 99% of the time.
But if the 1% matters, then it does - hence the max optionality.
It seems the focus for OP may be on the 1%.
Well, a big name helps there. Doesn’t assure anything but could help over a non big name.
I 100% agree with this statement. I think the value of prestige is in the option value. If your kid knows exactly what they want to do, then I think the name doesn’t matter that much. But if they’re unsure, then the prestige can potentially open up options that might not be as accessible elsewhere.