@lostaccount I think there is a difference between comparing student vs student than school vs school. One would assume a student that got into Harvard but choose to go to UA for money reason will do well no matter what. I agree it doesn’t work the same in reverse. But that’s about the student not the school.
sensation 723, Well, not really because those students who opted not to go to the Ivy School may have had unusual compensatory skills/resources that are influential for that student and that informed the decision to turn down the Ivy (say, parents own business so they know they are in a good position to be hired from any school). And that is a rarified population to begin with. The majority of students are decided between a lower rated far cheaper school and a more highly rated but not tippy top school–and posters are using that one study as support for the idea that schools don’t matter. Well we know that those from low SES backgrounds who attend Ivy schools benefit differentially (compared to middle and upper middle class students attending Ivy League schools). But do findings from that earlier study generalize to decisions regarding attending a directional public college instead of a higher ranked private school (ranked, say 30-70). That is the usual scenario discussed here. I am not sure that the oft cited study is relevant.
But either way, if the college does impact first job, and if 2nd job is dependent upon previous achievements, previous salary, etc then the college attended does impact on life trajectory and the impact grows rather than becoming diminished over time.
Baruch is good for business but nothing else. But tbf, Baruch and Hunter are the only CUNY schools that are decent at all. Neither are even as good as UNC Asheville.
Thankfully, my school isn’t at all “low level” - actually very underrated and is a solid 4-star school academically from my POV - but the fact that top MBA programs like Wharton and Harvard (the ones I’m shooting for) like students who went to comparable institutions does scare me a bit if I’m being honest. But it’s nothing that hard work won’t fix. 
@LBad96 I don’t think the purpose of this thread is to compare schools…
@happy1 didn’t mean to start a comparison battle, just providing an example.
My experience tells me it does matter. I went to a flagship public school and later went to an Ivy to get my MBA. The students that went to Ivy’s or high end LAC schools were clearly ahead of the game on multiple education metrics when compared to those who went to public universities. I cannot totally exclude the factor that many of my classmates were already gifted to some degree before they arrived at their elite undergraduate schools…but my subsequent experience leads me to believe that their elite schools had a lot to do with it.
Well, not if that Ivy League English major becomes a McKinsey consultant or a marketing manager.
I think that’s only half true. First of all, we’re making this artificial division between “Ivy League” and “state schools” forgetting that there are many elite public universities with excellent students - UVa, Michigan, Berkeley, UCLA - as well as well-respected honors colleges that attract top students like Barrett, Schreyer, etc.
And second of all, that’s more due to exposure than actual desire. I think there are just as many public university students who want to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and software developers as Ivy League/elite private school students. The gap comes in with careers like actuary, management consultant, informaticist, hedge fund manager, etc. - lesser-known careers that the Ivy League kids get exposed to because that’s what their parents’ friends do. The public university kids are far less likely to know a hedge fund manager and more likely to know teachers, social workers, middle managers, etc. But I bet if they were exposed to those higher-paying careers they’d want it too.
This article really had only one conclusion, smarter students (based on SAT scores) made more money. Perhaps they were more likely to attend graduate school which has a very high correlation with increased income.
I’ve been seeing lots of articles lately that say your major is more important than the school you went to. Makes sense to me.
If money is what defines success, which seems to be what people here are saying, I would think a computer science grad from Directional State U would be more successful than a sociology grad from an Ivy.
It is interesting how often outliers are used to justify generalizations.
The following are some random thoughts:
- All populations fall on a bell curve, particularly as it relates to success defined by created income/wealth. The real question relates to where the center of the bell curve for any given university/LAC sits relative to the center for other institutions. Every college will have outliers that perform well relative to the graduates of other universities. However, the more elite the university, the farther to the right the bell curve will fall relative to most others.
- Many might argue that the above bullet point is the result of elite colleges attracting better talent, and a previous dean of the Harvard Business School, Kim Clark, would agree with you. That said, iron does sharpen iron and there is an exciting intellectual growth that comes from interacting with others of the best and brightest. If nothing else you have the confidence of knowing what the best and brightest are capable of, and that you can compete effectively at the highest levels.
- The top graduate schools are predominantly populated with the graduates of elite undergraduate institutions at the student, professorial and administration (including admissions) levels.
- I have never heard a classmate or graduate of an elite educational institution suggest that it was anything other than a valuable life enhancing and/or life changing experience which has remained with them throughout their life. Undoubtedly there will be outliers who feel otherwise, but my guess is they are a small minority.
- While there are many who say that where you were educated is only relevant in terms of getting your first job, probably does not have an elite university degree, is an outlier, or is in a profession where it is immaterial. Those who have elite degrees and are in a profession where it is relevant know it stays with you and remains important throughout your life, particularly if you in the higher echelons of business/law/society. Anyone who has been pitched by a professional services related firm (legal, investment banking, accounting, investment, venture, private equity, advertising, IT, etc.) or has evaluated the business plan of a company seeking investment will note that the degrees of every key individual are included, and they are noted by the readers (and I could go on with any more examples).
- An elite degree helps make the barriers to spending your life pursuing what you are most passionate about as low as possible. There are professions that are extremely difficult to get into without an elite degree or connection. These include elite finance (M&A, corporate finance, private equity, venture capital) and strategic consulting, among others.
- We are in an era where people move from one career to another more and more often. When making these jumps those hiring into the new career may not be able to fully evaluate the previous work experience, but they can easily evaluate the academic credentials.
- There are always those who say “go to any college, do well and then go to a top graduate school.” There are some professions where that will work (for example, medicine). However, if you want to go to business school, the best jobs for demonstrating capability to get into the top business schools are the jobs that are limited to those with elite degrees. Also, as many students change direction in college, there is a risk of entering a non-elite institution with the intention of going into a profession where the degree doesn’t matter and finding that you are more interested in one where it does.
- The argument that an engineering major from a mid-tier university will earn more than an English major from an elite university is not only potentially not true (as @juillet pointed out), but specious. Many people want to follow their interests and passions. So, the more important question relates to whether graduates in the same major have access to the same opportunities.
In summary, unless you have experienced the benefits of attending an elite academic institution and have benefitted from the access they provide you are unlikely to fully understand or appreciate the benefits. If the above wasn’t true, you wouldn’t have parents with elite degrees desperately wanting the same for their children. This is not necessarily because an elite degree confers prestige, but, more importantly, for what it does for their children’s intellectual development and access to the careers they find most interesting.
Not necessarily. No matter what institution of higher learning one attends, they only know their own experience. Parents with elite degrees generally only know the experiences they and their immediate peers have had. They really have no idea what it’s really like to attend a large flagship university, making the most of the many intellectual (and other) opportunities available, and moving into a satisfying career. Is it at all possible that the parents with those elite degrees “desperately” want the same for their children because they simply are ignorant of how much intellectual development can take place outside the elite bubble?
I personally believe that many people with the background you describe really need to believe that their educational experience is superior to that of others who did not attend schools in the top 20 of the USNWR rankings. That belief isn’t necessarily the truth.
@Joblue, you are missing the point - there are many opportunities that are simply not accessible to those who haven’t availed themselves of an elite degree (yes there are always the exceptions that disprove the rule, but they are the extreme outliers on the bell curve of their university). For those who want unbounded opportunities, the best path is an elite degree. For many this is not important, and for them an elite degree is unnecessary. This goes back to the issue of fit.
@am61517, you don’t have any experience relating to engineering or computer science, do you? Your school is not a big deal in those fields. It’s what you know that matters, not where you went to school. I see people from mid-tier state schools running companies and departments, and managing elite school graduates, all the time.
Ok @simba9, lets think about the engineering/computer science field. There are the mainstream jobs, and there are the jobs leading tech related start-ups, doing leading edge research, driving the frontiers of science, etc. My experience suggests that many of the leaders doing the latter come out of Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford, Harvey Mudd, the leading Tech universities in India and Isreal, etc. (not to say there aren’t outliers like Marc Andreessen (UI) Michael Dell (UT) who both were in what would be considered elite departments within flagships).
I am not suggesting that you can’t achieve a good career in engineering or computer science attending a mid-tier state school. It goes back to fit. What are a student’s objectives? Do they want to push frontiers, or not? Some universities are oriented toward teaching current practice (predominantly the mid-tier), while others are focused on innovation and knowledge creation (the elite research oriented tech universities).
I would add that many students enter college thinking that they will major in Engineering or CS, and then decide their passion for it is not strong enough to sustain a career. Their new career objectives may, or may not, be easily achievable through that mid-tier university.
The real point of all this is to say that it is nonsense to think that it doesn’t matter where you go to college. The college you attend needs to fit your objectives in life.
I am an engineer and my experience is in concord with am61517’s posts. But there are lots of CC posters that believe that engineers with degrees from places like Utah State, Arizona State, and New Mexico State are just as well prepared as those from MIT, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, etc. Many CC posters vehemently dispute that one’s educational pedigree is helpful in an engineering career or that managers care at all about degrees when hiring or assigning tasks. I’m told that my career and my company are outliers, something that I find hard to fathom.
I don’t have to think about it. I work in tech in the SF/Silicon Valley area, and see it up close. Before 2000 going to a place like Stanford or MIT mattered because there were venture capitalists and angel investors hanging around campus, but now almost anyone with a good idea and enough motivation can bootstrap something to the point where they can show it’s worthy of additional funding. The founders of companies like Twitter, Uber, Spotify, and Airbnb didn’t go to elite schools. (Well, Airbnb’s founders did go to a prestigious art school.) There are innumerable start-ups around here - many more than there are graduates of elite schools.
Most leading edge research in CS is being done in the bigger companies like Google or small start-ups. Sometimes they work in partnership with universities, but there’s huge incentive to develop and commercialize technologies, so most of the money for cutting edge technology goes to business entities because they’re best positioned to do that.
As someone who runs tech startups and hires software engineers regularly:
Yes it matters for that first job and the engineer from MIT will likely get put on top of the resume pile over the guys from State U.
Once you get experience, however, the impact of the degree dramatically lessens.
I post this fact all the time, so forgive me for those that have read it before. My shop has engineers from several top schools like CMU and others, but the 3 indispensable geniuses are all coincidentally products of 3 separate SUNY schools. We are desperate for experienced Android engineers right now and don’t care where they went to school if they have proven skills – but if I got two similar resumes and one said MIT, I’d call him first.
If you are committed to the craft of software engineering, and do it because you love it and not just for a job, and do it in your spare time as well… that kind of guy will always, always, always have a great job if they want one.
(for the record, we never get resumes from MIT! We’re not that prestigious a startup and don’t recruit on campus)
The comment in the OP’s article about less than 30% of Fortune 100 CEOs being from the Ivy League, and about 70% went to a more typical college, seems to be work against the thesis from my perspective. I get it that most CEOs do not come from a very top school, and that is valid.
However, less than 1/2 of one percent of undergrads are attending an Ivy. That suggests to me that a student from an Ivy League school has a 60x greater chance of becoming CEO. (1/2 percent of students are getting 30% of the CEO positions.) In my opinion, That is not making a convincing case that where you go to school does not matter.
And to add to the @Much2learn comment above, keep in mind that there are many elite schools that are non-Ivy league (ex. MIT, Stanford, Williams, UChicago to name but a very few) so CEO’s from those other elite schools would not have been included on the list of Ivy alum CEO’s.
^ Here is a scholarly article that attempts to define elite schools (see Table 1) and looks for correlation among CEOs, federal judges, billionaires, senators, and house members:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/56143/wai-americas-elite-2013.pdf
The paper concludes that:
“America’s elite are largely drawn from the intellectually gifted, with many in the top 1% of ability.”