Why doesn’t she have her pick?
If it doesn’t matter, why does anyone go to an elite private or highly selective public? If it doesn’t matter, why do kids apply to honors programs at state Us? With it’s honors program, isn’t the state U trying to attract a higher quality student that would want to be surrounded with other top students? Of course it matters. “Matters” doesn’t need to be defined by employment outcomes. But that is certainly one acceptable criteria.
Be honest with yourself. If money was a non issue, where would you send your kid? Probably to the best possible fit. In many cases that would include highly selective and elite privates because the overall ecosystem provides for a wonderful launching pad. Imagine being at a university where the norm is to succeed (it’s just in the water). Where most move on to great first jobs or strong graduate programs. Where your kid was challenged and thrived. Where they gained confidence and built a nice network. Why wouldn’t you want those things?
So, if your kid gets accepted to that situation and you can afford it, why would you fall back to the position of saying “hey kiddo, it doesn’t matter where you go?” If you can’t afford it, you can’t. I get that. I wouldn’t take on lots of debt or spend my retirement either. But if you can swing it without peril, I can’t imagine not doing it. We had that decision. In state UF Honors with scholarship vs. several small, high quality institutions (William & Mary, Richmond, Lehigh, Wake Forest). Son “could have been fine” at UF (and I’m sure he would have) but he is thriving at Wake Forest. There is no comparison to the overall quality, resources and intimate experience. Forget about job outcomes, just the experience itself. And the job placement in top shelf organizations is stellar. Fortunately we are able to swing it, so we did.
Both my wife and I are products of public HS and large state Us and we did pretty well. I own a business and earn a very comfortable living. So yes you can do quite well form anywhere if you are determined. That said, I would have loved to attend a school like my son’s. Heck, I’d like to go there now!
@rickle1 If money were no option, I would send my kids to the school with the best fit. Absolutely. I would never tell them where you go to school doesn’t matter. I would also tell them that prestige is not the same as fit. There are kids who would do much better at a small nurturing LAC then at a large impersonal IVY even if they could get in. There are kids who are perfect for Sarah Lawrence but who will convince themselves to go to Cornell if they are admitted. Too often, on here, we conflate “fit” with “prestige.”
I would also hope that my kids would understand that while college is an important time of life, it is only 4 years. They have the entire future before them. Not everyone can have that idyllic campus experience, sitting under IVY covered walls, playing frisbee on the quad and having brunch with professors. I would hope they understand that life doesn’t stop just because they can’t have everything Hollywood promises college is supposed to be.
College matters for the experience of those four years. That isn’t nothing, but it isn’t everything either. Where you go to college matters very little in the grand scheme of whether you can have a fulfilling and successful life. That matters most.
^^^ I agree that fit is most important. I don’t care about prestige. If the fit happens to be at a school others consider prestigious, so be it. If not, not. I also agree that one can’t expect to have everything they want and there’s no such thing as a perfect match or one “soul mate” college.
That’s why it’s so important to drill down and define what makes a great fit (will be different for each kid). In our case, the focus was on smaller schools (than the large state Us - and lots of other things). We were able to do that so we chose to do it. We could have said, “well these places seem great, but you can can do just as well at state U, so go there”. The reality is, he is on a different trajectory than he likely would have been at state U. It’s not that he couldn’t have been, but he likely wouldn’t have been. It is a very different ecosystem, one that will provide him with a great set of tools to both launch and use for the rest of his life. We think that’s important enough to invest in that system. He does too as he chose that with skin in the game, vs. state U and no debt (we limited his debt to the federal system which will be 27,500 max over four years). He knows that he needs to work during the summers to contribute and will have to have a job for spending money during the school yr. Even that has been a good experience as he found a job on campus that is relevant to his major and will actually add to his learning experience.
We are quite pleased with our decision and hope everyone else is too.
As a wedding planner she would be making a tenth of what she is making now. She wouldn’t be able to support the life style is is accustom to, and she is not to expect her husband to do it for her. She is saving her bonuses so she could her pick later in life.
@rickle1 I don’t think **anyone **is going to argue that working hard in high school, being accepted to to an elite school that they really want to attend, and subsequently attending that school is going to hinder someone’s career or limit their future. (I think it is wonderful if parents can offer those kids those options.)
However, you have thread upon thread, post upon post about high performing kids being rejected from the schools they really wanted to attend bc that is the only path to the future they see for themselves. These kids (and even some parents) truly accept the premise that where they attend does define their future b/c that is what they have heard/been told/read and are convinced that that is the truth.
The bigger picture here is that it is not so black and white. These kids can attend their dreaded safety school (whether due to rejections or finances), pursue the opportunities on that campus, and still end up being able to pursue the same sort of future they had hoped for before their rejection letters or financial aid packages eliminated those options.
That is what kids need to know. They need to know that their schools do not define who they are and their futures. They do. It truly is “where you go is not who you will be.” They need to understand that their conviction that their future is predetermined by school attendance is a false premise.
They can go to that lower ranked school and end up in exactly the same place as students who did attend the higher ranked schools that they did not have the option of attending.
.I have to say, while I agree with the article’s premise that there are many paths to success, the idea that college itself is not important seems a little disingenuous coming from a man whose success is due to his PhD psychology.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek Post #145 hits the nail squarely on the head!
@oldfort maybe she doesn’t need the lifestyle she is accustomed to.
Hmmm, if you know her then you wouldn’t say that. At the same time, she is doing on her own and does not feel entitled through others. She is not just considering her own lifestyle, she is also thinking about her kids’ (she doesn’t have yet) future and how she wants to provide for them.
D2 is having a hard time reconciling between her love of public service vs the lifestyle she wants. Based on the grad school she is choosing, I think she probably will need to go to private sector before she could move over to public sector.
“However, you have thread upon thread, post upon post about high performing kids being rejected from the schools they really wanted to attend bc that is the only path to the future they see for themselves. These kids (and even some parents) truly accept the premise that where they attend does define their future b/c that is what they have heard/been told/read and are convinced that that is the truth.”
Exactly, the article is not that you shouldn’t go to a top school if accepted, it’s that where you go to undergrad has little or no correlation with success in the US (however you want to define that). A lot of studies have been done, and they just can’t show any meaningful correlation, much less causation. The broader idea in the article is that high schoolers and sometimes even middle schoolers are just too stressed out worrying about this. And they end up with less sleep, less sense of self, which is what the author as a psychologist is trying to say. Not happy or healthy childhoods.
70% of Fortune 500 CEOs did not attend an elite college. So it does not matter.
But 30% of those CEOs DID attend an elite college. So you are 10 times more likely to be a CEO if you attend an elite college. So it does matter a lot.
Actually attending Princeton is pretty helpful for signaling purposes and for networks. Jeff Bezos!! But attending Princeton is not the most important thing. What matters the most is being the kind of person who can get admitted to Princeton. Or Harvard – Zuckerberg, Gates!!
Princeton isn’t admitting applicants on a random basis. So if you are Princeton material as a 17 year old (smart, ambitious, hard working, able to navigate and succeed in complex situations, etc. etc. etc.), you are already well on your way to life success. Regardless of whether you actually wind up attending Princeton or Penn State or even dropping out.
@itsgettingreal17 at Harvard it’s 13% finance (IB/PE), 12% consulting. Only ~64% really enter the work force (graduate school, travel, volunteering take a bunch). So 40% do finance/consulting where it matters a lot where you attend school. It’s not a narrow path at all.
My scope of only looking at elite schools Is the narrow part.
@NashSaddle That’s some interesting math and assumptions.
(12%+13%)/64% =39.06% of people who enter the work force went into finance and consulting. Not sure why it is interesting math.
@itsgettingreal17 what part confuses you? It’s basic division. There were no assumptions made. I rounded 39% to 40%. In 2016 it would have been a flat 40%. If we include tech, where school matters but I’m less certain of the extent because I don’t work in that field, then this jumps to 58%.
This thread vacillates between extremes. Where you go to college matters, despite whatever the flawed Krueger studies said. However, the median individual income of a Harvard grad was only $81500 at 34. While a lot better than the results for the typical state school grad, and grad/professional school may delay their peak earning years, few Harvard grads will ever attain the tens of millions that another poster alluded to unless they inherit it or marry into it.
@oldfort and @NashSaddle It’s interesting because you can’t ignore everyone else. You’re ignoring those who don’t enter the workforce to bolster your argument. Except they do matter for purposes of our discussion. Only 13% of Harvard students in the graduating class care about finance. Not all of them in the more lucrative fields (you assumed all 13% were IB). That is a very small number to be so hyper focused on since all the Ivy education is so important folks hang their arguments on the exclusivity of IB. Consulting is another small percentage, and the fact is that consulting is possible from a wide variety of schools, including schools ranked in the triple digits.
The problem with median income is that it may not tell you a lot. About half of the students at Harvard come from very wealthy families so they may end up doing volunteer work, or yoga instructing or many other things because they will never have to worry about money. This can heavily skew a statistic when you compare against other schools. It might be better to take a look at total wealth including trust funds etc., eliminate those who don’t have to work and then find the median income, you might find that it is quite different.
@itsgettingreal17 consulting at the more prestigious (better paying, better exit opps) firms is only available from better schools. Banking is not the lucrative career path but it is the most common path in finance at Harvard. Of that 13% there are students going to PE/VC/HF which are even more difficult to obtain from lesser schools. 40% is conservative because it ignores other fields where school also matters.