It’s Time to Tell Your Kids It Doesn’t Matter Where They Go To College

Parents Forum
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@labegg I did state that my kids were part of elite honors programs. In post 66 I wrote

I absolutely acknowledge the benefits of the programs they are involved in. I have never attempted to state otherwise bc my entire point in posting has been that internally motivated high achieving kids will be successful precisely b/c they are internally motivated and already high achieving. I agree that is you cannot compare avg students functioning on very avg scales at a lower ranked school with competitive outcomes at elite schools. I agree that it is unlikely that they are going to have equal outcomes. But, from my perspective that argument would make no sense in terms of the direction this thread has taken b/c those students would never have been on par with elite school admissions in the first place.

I knew about @itsgettingreal’s dd situation bc we discussed these exact same scenarios last yr on the parents of 2017 thread. I wasn’t paying enough attention during the thread to know what she did and didn’t share bc I read her responses already knowing her dd’s history. I posted the mentoring and support her dd is receiving b/c of the dismissal of the idea that she could be receiving those interviews at a public U. Based on the offers her dd received last yr, I believe that her dd will be as successful as her dd desires to be.

However, I also believe that there are a lot students who find themselves after college and will make their way regardless. Their path may be less direct, but sometimes the scenic route builds a better path anyway.

@“Nash saddle” Parents. Students. This a field that at dd’s school they are working with students on, not one I am familiar with or have kids who are at all interested in. At her school they have started a Finance Scholars Program. I don’t know much about it other than knowing the outcome of a couple of students. https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/moore/academic_departments_and_research/academic_departments/department_of_finance/finance_scholars.php

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This last sentence may be important in the aspirations, hopes, and disappointments of the kids of the self-described “upper middle class who will not get college financial aid anywhere”. When one is in the top 3% of income/wealth, there is little room to move up in that respect, and moving up in a noticeable manner can mean having to make the jump into the plutocrat class, while there is plenty of room to move down.

Even if choice of college is not a big factor in future financial success, it may feel like that to high school seniors, particularly those who have grown up in affluence and believe that an elite expensive college is desirable if one wants to make the jump into the plutocrat class (through investment banking or consulting). But if the parents spent too much on the affluent life as the kids were growing up, they may have to limit the kids’ college options for cost reasons.

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Depends on what your definition of “top firms” is. In some industries, recruiting is more elitist in terms of school prestige than in other industries. There is also variation between employers within industries and individuals within employers.

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There are plenty of these discussions on CC all with different titles but the fact is the answer to this question is the same as it is for the chicken or the egg. What ever side of the discussion you are on you will remain. There is no argument that will sway you as there is not a true answer. When my oldest was looking for schools with the plan of being a school teacher in New Jersey, the best career option for her was to go to a school that got all of its grads jobs. TCNJ it was,an elite school would not have been more beneficial career wise. Now my next son wanted to do IB in NYC. For him, going to a top LAC made sense as companies hired from his campus. When you make statements we talk in generalizations. Yes, you can end up in IB from other schools but the opportunity is not as great.
When my son went on Junior Super days for internships, these students were flown in on the companies dime to NYC. The students wore name tags.They were almost all from Elite schools. Each situation is different, each family decides whats best for them. We as a family decided that taking out loans for him made sense. He/we bet that it would work career wise.He has been out for almost two years and was fortunate enough to end up exactly where he wanted to be.
The Elite school was the right choice for us.

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@itsgettingreal17 my poorly articulated point was…you clearly think it matters where you attend college otherwise your student would not be attending UGA in their very elite program, Your family choose that program because of it’s benefits over all of her other offers. It mattered to you where she went to college, you calculated and then gambled that she would have better opportunities based on the prestige of the program at UGA. Otherwise she could have simply attended UGA without the elite program or even Georgia State, where she would have had access to D1 football, school spirit and affordable tuition, all things you said were important in post #75.

Lol, in the end I think we are actually on the same page…the obsession of some, particularly here on CC, on elite schools to attain success, is not necessarily born out in real life, but where you attend is important to a certain extent; who you are (work ethic, personality etc) and how you utilize opportunity matters more. You can achieve success from many different paths and everyone’s idea of success if different.

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“@elodyCOH and that is why you don’t get applicants from elite schools, they are going to top 10 companies, not top 500.”

Applicants from the elite schools are not going to the top-10 companies, esp if you define top10 by market capitalization. Graduates from elite schools do not have any advantage at the top-10 companies since most of the top-15 companies are in high tech and one founded and run by University of Arkansas graduates. Taking out Berkshire here are the real top-15 companies that create value and jobs for the US.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, JP Morgan, J&J, Visa, Exxon, B of A, Walmart, Wells Fargo, Intel, Chevron, AT&T

What is your definition of top-10, McKinsey, Bain, Goldman, Deloitte, BCG? Good companies, but they don’t create value, they analyze value that companies like Apple (founded by a Reed drop out, community college/Berkeley grad) create.

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@labegg I guess we do agree to some extent. :slight_smile:

My D chose the best fit among all her full ride offers. What mattered wasn’t ranking. In fact, her #2 choice was a school ranked below 100, which was very strong in her areas of interest (tops in one). She only applied to schools that fit her requirements. No prestige hunting in my home. But to each their own.

And there are very successful people graduating from UGA without the program she has.

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@lastone03 The debate in this thread is around whether attending an elite (but very expensive) college is worth it. Ask almost any good student at Harvard or Wharton if they want to work at one at non-tech F500 and the answer is no. My scope is limited to the top few schools where it actually is worth the cost of attendance.

@ucbalumnus I’m referring to finance and to a lesser extent consulting. I admittedly know very little about recruiting into other fields. My point was just that if you want PE/HF or a top bank, then the school matters a tremendous amount.

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@NashSaddle Where do you come up with this stuff? lol

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@itsgettingreal17 You’re misinforming people which is dangerous to ambitious students. They should understand that there are in fact much better opportunities provided at top schools (for certain career paths).

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@NashSaddle I was curious, so looked up Harvard’s employment stats for last year. A whopping 12% went into finance. And I guarantee you that not all of them went into banking. I have no reason to believe the stats will be different at other top schools. And the overwhelming majority won’t last more than 2 years. So why are you so stuck on this one very narrow career path? Where are ALL the elite school students that you said want only to work for top 10 companies? Go ahead and also look at net worth of Harvard grads 10 years out. It doesn’t look like most think like you do.

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@NashSaddle thank you for saying that your scope is very narrow. That makes more sense since there are multiple debates in this thread.

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@lastone03 So narrow that it really misses the larger discussion, even more so when you go back to the original post. The article is about empowering students to see their futures as not being rigidly and narrowly defined.

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^I think that’s the crux, here. The article is about empowering students to see their futures as not being rigidly defined, and teaching them that there are many different paths to success. But the author ties this up with a lot of only tangentially related, irrelevant aspects that actually weaken his argument.

Yes, only one-third of adults in the U.S. have college degrees. However, there’s a large body of research showing that adults with college degrees have lower unemployment rates and make more money; they also tend to be happier and healthier overall.

The examples of the super-rich folks who started companies without a college degree are often 1) people from an era in which a college degree was less important for getting jobs (many, but John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford are probably the most egregious on that list); 2) people who come from wealthy families and had access to resources that helped them start their companies (Ted Turner, Anna Wintour, Kim Kardashian, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Rachael Ray), and/or 3) people who actually started at colleges, sometimes elite ones, before founding their companies (Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Russell Simmons, Michael Dell, Kevin Rose).

It’s of course possible to do quite well in life without a college degree, but more often than not those folks will be working-class to middle-class and will need some sort of postsecondary training (a vocational program or associate’s degree, for example).

Also, the study he linked to doesn’t say “you’ll do equally well in terms of income, job satisfaction and life satisfaction whether you go to an elite private college or a less-selective state university” (although I do believe that’s probably at least partially true, if you control for other influential factors). The Pew Research survey compared private and public college graduates (regardless of selectivity - there are a lot of selective public universities and non-selective private schools) about the graduates’ feelings about their return on investment and life and career satisfaction.

There are other, better studies he could’ve cited here to make his point, like the Dartmouth study showing that students who turned down elite private schools (e.g., were good enough to get into them, but chose not to attend) did just as well later on in life and career as the people who attended.

The important part was this:

It’s this idea that your whole life’s trajectory is set and unchangeable at age 17, based on your performance in high school. The idea that you have to grind endlessly in high school otherwise your life is ruined; or that you have to have your entire career chosen and planned out before you even head off to college; or that the accolades and ranks and numbers you achieve between 14 and 17 will somehow have some larger bearing on the rest of your life beyond that. And yes, that the only key to a happy, successful life is to attend an elite private college.

Those are the ideas that are damaging to students.

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For bright students with well-connected families school of attendance might not matter very much. Family’s connections will place those students well for elite internships and jobs with no regards to the school they attended. For those who are fist in the family in attempt to brake into the next socioeconomic level, elite schools might be the only chance. But it all depends on a student’s goals and ambitions.

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Several interesting points that I realized when I researched HC merit money vs Berkeley/UCLA for a NMF kid.

  1. I thought it was ironic (even though logical under the current system) that people who were seriously considering attending HCs with merit moneys were middle to high middle class families who would have to pay substantial money to attend private colleges. As someone mentioned, HYPSM especially will be largely composed of very rich families who would have no problem paying full costs and relatively poor families who will receive nearly full costs in financial grants. Middle class families will practically have very tough time sending their kids to HYPSM even if their kids are accepted. I guess if someone pointed out the very fact that we can even send our kid fully pay at Stanford in itself means we are kind of rich, I have no argument, although I don't feel "rich" at all because I am living in Southern CA where relative costs are very high.
  2. I really think it depends on your high academic kid’s buying into going to HC with great merit money. In our case, I was not willing to force our kid to attend HC over Stanford.
  3. I realized that for me, there are around 3 or less private colleges which I would have been happy (satisfied) to send our kid over HC with merit money. Stanford was one of them.
  4. I would not have considered Univ of South Carolina HC were it not for the fact that they have a number one ranked International Business UG Program. In other words, for us, that was a huge reason that we considered HC of USC.
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The idea that it takes an income of $250,000+ per year (where FA at HYPSM is minimal to none) to be “middle class” may also be a source of anxiety to many people. If people believe that one needs to reach the top 3% or so of income and wealth to be “middle class”, then there is much more pressure to be “elite” somehow, and every apparent advantage to reaching “eliteness” (including attending an “elite” college) gets magnified in importance. Just graduating from college, starting at a $35,000 to $50,000 per year job, and working one’s way up to a $100,000 per year job over one’s career may not seem appealing to someone used to the idea of $250,000+ per year as “middle class”.

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Let me just say this, as an Ivy grad, I have never been unemployed. I have been able to start businesses( 2) and have had many opportunities where they have been given due to my experience and the name of the school. I have been asked to be on boards (the first when I was only 25). There is just no way that would have happened without the education. Is it worth it? Well it’s a lot of money. And it’s crazy.
But yes, I would say, every penny. ( Then again Ivys pay based on need and I was in need so my parents didn’t take on big debt and neither did I).
To echo someone else, all the major consulting firms do come to Ivy schools to recruit ( as does the CIA, FBI and many, many other firms). If you think of it more like how many years making an extra 20-40 K will it take to pay back you might have a different mindset. Also, many of the best jobs today come with stock options so that is also a financial factor. Not many kids coming out with a solid major from an Ivy school are looking for work. If they want it, they can get it.
Yes, in some fields it doesn’t matter. But if you work for yourself, your college will pay you back each and every day. Ask any lawyer, consultant etc.
And yes, I believe you can attain anything from anywhere. It’s just mathematically your chances are better if you have the easy equation.

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D1 knew she was going to be in IB since HS. She met many of my friends to get their input on majors and schools she should go to. The reason she didn’t go to an UG business school, but instead opted for math and econ double majors at an A&S school was based on input from few people in the business. I knew she had to go to one of those target schools or she wouldn’t be able to get a foot in the door. She joined her firm as a Junior intern and is a VP at her firm and up for another promotion next year. If D1 had her pick she would be a wedding or event planner because she loves parties, but she said her job is very similar to an event planner - the trick to get the right parties together and make sure they show up when they are supposed to. She said this job pays better. :slight_smile:

Where D2 is interning now they only take 2-3 interns each year. I think to limit number of applicants, they only hire graduates from Ivies and Stanford, and recently included Chicago. Do they believe a top student from Rutgers wouldn’t be able to do the job? Do they believe NU is really that different than Cornell?

D1 decided she didn’t need to get an MBA to further her career, but for other bright young people who may want to pivot or add to their resumes, it is a good idea to go to a top tier grad school, especially if it could be paid for by an employer or grad school. It is what my niece is doing after working at a consulting firm.

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If it doesn’t matter why is this thread so long ? :slight_smile: