@iwannabe_Brown, ahh, everyone deserves to be happy from age 0 to 100 - doesn’t mean everyone chooses happiness. Is your glass half full or half empty?
The small number of students into all Ivies still had to do supps for each. You either do it right or not. The fact some kids get into more than one doesn’t mean you get to throw out the idea of showing your match, your understanding. It doesn’t mean an admit is lottery or crapshoot. One of the fastest ways to get disinterest is the generic or off Why Us. That doesn’t mean a kid can’t manufacture that. It does mean they can’t just pull it out of thin air.
It’s interesting that the “rank college ACT” list in #46 and the Payscale ROI rankings have Caltech, HMC, and MIT in the top three positions.
http://www.payscale.com/college-roi/school-type/private
It’s routinely argued that ROI for tech schools is skewed because STEM majors make more money than grads at schools that have a broader selection of majors. Sure. Lots of people also believe that the Payscale data are flawed. Ok. And others argue that ACT (or SAT) scores aren’t always an indication of intelligence. Alright. The caveats can go on and on…
Nevertheless, I wonder if there really isn’t something meaningful in the ACT-ROI correlation at the very top. Seems like common sense that really smart kids that attend highly-ranked tech schools generally end up doing very well financially.
I think many would like to believe high scores guarantee something. And maybe, because they usually reflect some effort and savvy, they have ‘some’ predictive value. But it’s too simplistic to think high scores on some test days at 16 or 17 are the be all and end all. It takes far more in life to succeed than mastering some (imperfect) test.
So when these arguments get bogged in scores or gpa or whether SAT tells more than ACT, I do sigh. Same when you want to measure by salary (at some point after grad.) Most of the apps I’ve seen are high stats/rigor. There’s still a very real difference between those who “get it” and those who don’t.
And let’s face that it takes more than some SAT/ACT score to get into the most prestigious colleges. You can go on and deny or decry. But I think some CC folks like to look for tidy little boxes and checklists to predict with. That’s not the whole picture. I think you know that, in real life.
@lookingforward, I don’t think anyone disagrees that selection is much more than ACT/SAT ranking, Endowment per student or ROI.
For our twin DD’s,
- IT STARTED with what we could afford, how far from home, big school vs small school, urban vs suburban vs rural, the types of majors they were likely to be interested in and which schools had what,
- THEN we began to look at where they could expect to get into including a broad mix of targets, reaches and safeties,
- AND THEN they applied ED and RD
- AND THEN AND ONLY THEN as decisions came in did we sit back and say if several schools felt the same to our DD’s which one seemed like the one with the smartest kids, best departments for their areas of interest, best cultural fit, happiest students, biggest endowment/facilities, best ROI - I don’t know any better way to approach it as while we can’t predict the outcome 4 years. 10 years or a lifetime from now we/they needed to go through a process that made sense.
That said as the funnel got tighter, they had the final say as its their school not mine.
Translation: Ivies admit those who can BS a good Why Us essay.
@roethlisburger: “Translation: Ivies admit those who can BS a good Why Us essay.”
That takes research and skill (and drive). The type of abilities that can carry someone far in life in many fields.
Yeah, it is what it is and isn’t what it isn’t.
You throw down a gauntlet, roeth, lol.
^I’m glad I could make you laugh.
“Fake it till you make it” has a lot of applications in life, as long as you finally make it.
MIT has a very engineering-heavy mix of majors compared to most other schools.
Fortunately, MIT offers career survey information by major:
https://gecd.mit.edu/resources/survey-data
MIT’s median new bachelor’s graduate pay cannot be $110,900, since the major with the highest median for 2016 is $110,000.
If you checked my links, I was referring to the Chetty data. You can check again, but I believe they measure income at 34, not new grads.
In any case, it still needs to be done by major, due to the considerable major-dependence on subsequent pay levels that college graduates find (whether they are due to specific pre-professional preparation associated with the major, or the tendency of students who choose particular majors to go into high or low paying professions after graduation).
It is not the prestigious schools that make the students earn high amounts of money. The students who get in to Harvard could go to almost any college in America and still make a sizable income. Schools like Harvard and MIT have the students who make the highest median income, because they get the most driven students. The schools themselves don’t actually do anything for them.
^ That’s not really true either.
“Schools like Harvard and MIT have the students who make the highest median income, because they get the most driven students.”
I agree with this much. However…
“The schools themselves don’t actually do anything for them.”
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the schools don’t do “anything”. I would say that the difference between incoming students is the dominant factor in the difference in results, but not necessarily the only factor (especially if we start comparing MIT and Harvard with anything ranked lower than about 500 or 1000 – which admittedly might be a silly comparison).
Given the original title of this thread, there is another thing that bothers me in the original title which we probably have overlooked (or at least not picked on sufficiently). This is the word “only”. Even if I were to agree that going to a highly ranked university would cause my child to make more money, I still wouldn’t agree that prestige and money are the “only” things that should be considered.
I think there is something to be said for going to a school where the expectation is to work hard and finish strong, very few classmates drop out or transfer, students don’t devote their time to partying at the expense of studying.
That’s an atmosphere that to my mind, makes it easier to succeed and it generally exists at elite colleges and universities.
^ That depends on the individual.
Really, so much comes down to fit.
Regarding “partying at the expense of studying”… at most residential colleges, including elite ones, parties are not especially difficult to find. Some residential colleges, including some elite ones, have a very hard partying reputation.
Of course there is partying. However partying is not a 7 days a week affair for any student who wants to graduate and the general culture at those schools seems to support a “work hard play hard” sort of ethic.
No one is partying at the expense of studying and staying in college, and the very low dropout rate and high 4-5 year grad rate at those schools speaks to that culture.
Party on weekends, sure. But not when you have exams and papers due, and generally not during the week. Anyone can find exceptions to that, but I am stating what i see as the general rule.