MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Let’s move on from determining the dictionary definition of “right” advice, please.
In sales and trading, a MBA isn’t typical, but for IB coverage bankers, it still is.
@hapworth
A truly excellent post above. He is making some points I agree with, but I get distracted by the factually incorrect information.
@coolguy40 you keep assuming that everyone is the same whether they went to an Ivy or not…bad assumption. The top schools have taken the cream of the crop and therefore common sense says they will continue to perform well above average, which in fact they do. They have already met a threshold that 99% of high school graduates have not. If I went to your college and picked out the top 3 or 4 students, I bet they are doing a whole lot better then the rest.
My kid and few kids I know are in IB coverage. My kid is actually in both world, trading and coverage. Her roommate quite her IB job to get her MBA because she wanted to pivot, otherwise she could have stayed.
@CU123 Understandable, but there aren’t enough “cream of the crop” for employers to even care. There’s far more to human intelligence and intuition than grades. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both college dropouts. Time and time again, employers discover that Harvard does not a qualified candidate make. 99.9% of the workforce in the world’s largest economy gets along just fine without them. If you look at a professional job posting site, nowhere does it say, “masters degree, or bachelors at awesome school.” The system you’re in brainwashes kids into thinking that they have to be better than each other. Well, wonders are made through cooperation and collaboration.
Bill Gates was in Harvard, and Steve Jobs was in Stanford. Both were officially accepted into these elite schools. They only dropped out one to continue developing his Microsoft “empire”, the other because he couldn’t pay the tuitioin. Another dropout is the founder of Facebook, who every knows was in Harvard. So using these individuals of college dropouts is a very poor example to support your “opinion”
@downallunder To quote Albert Einstein, “Everyone is a Genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it’s stupid.” That’s the entire premise behind the “elite” college superiority complex. You can score well on one microscopic subset of our complex human intelligence and call yourself “better” or “elite” because of it. Ironically, the people who can see past that facade is everyone else.
Thank you for your very irrelevant, most non sequitur “opinion”.
Steve Jobs actually dropped out from Reed College not Stanford.
And he dropped out of Reed because he couldn’t handle the work (according to his biography).
My bad, Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford, just confused.
This is nonsense.
As per @coolguy40 he’s entitled to nonsensical “opinions” I just hope noone gets misled by his nonsense antithetical opinions.
The value of an Ivy League degree, especially, undergraduate, varies greatly from industry to industry. For example, the mining (oil and gas) and chemical industries in the Gulf States (Gulf of Mexico, not Middle East) tended to favor hiring new college grads at the undergraduate level from non-Ivy League schools. Their collective experience tracking the success of employees over many years revealed a negative correlation with Ivy League pedigree. The issue was a mismatch of culture.
In contrast, other industries might favor undergraduates from Ivy League because admission to the highly selective colleges is tantamount to a form of pre-screening of candidates by the colleges. In fact, the major consulting firms such as BCG, Bain, McKinsey limit their campus recruiting to Ivy League and a few similarly selective schools.
Access to the most elite Wall Street firms and some facets of politics is made much easier for those students who belong to a few specific fraternities and “secret societies” at the Ivy League schools such as Dartmouth and Yale. For these very atypical career paths, the Ivy League could be very much worth the value. But even gaining entry to those exclusive frats and “secret societies” requires wealth and connections from the students’ families. So a student without such familial assets who does gain admission to Yale and Dartmouth would be most likely shut out of those secret societies. This situation describes one form of the modern American Aristocracy.
I recall reading a report suggesting that an Ivy League education does help raise the career trajectory of URM’s from low socio-economic backgrounds, but not for other demographic groups in general.
So whether an Ivy League pedigree is worth it depends on multiple factors. Not a simple answer.
When undergrads apply for their first position, it seems to me that the vast amount (all) of the content that may appear in their resume is either directly or indirectly related to the college they graduated from - GPA, classes taken, research conducted, summer internships held, and support network. So, to the extent that an Ivy education results in a stronger story than it’s worth it.
@PieceofMind - You are wrong about at least one of the top secret societies at Yale. My son, who just graduated, was in one of them and he comes from neither a wealthy nor connected family.
@roethlisburger If you look on a professional job posting page, nowhere will it say masters degree or bachelors from “prestigious” school. The distinction employers make is between a bachelors and a masters. These degrees have much different accreditation standards. A Harvard bachelors degree is accredited as a bachelors, no more, no less. A masters is officially accredited as a higher level of earned education. Comparing apples to apples in a job application, a masters degree by itself is generally worth 1-2 years of experience over a bachelors.
Its well worth it because the Ivy name will get your resume through the computer screening.
However all bachelors (or masters degrees) are not created equal. And that is where the debate takes place…