<p>“Which explains why the Ivies continue to become more and more selective and why HYP have single digit acceptance rates and why Columbia, Brown and Dartmouth approach them.”</p>
<p>Almost every college in the country is getting more selective. I would say all colleges are, but I don’t need ridiculous stats thrown at me.</p>
<p>The people obsessed with Ivies are either people who went there or children. It’s honestly not surprising that they’re so popular when you look at it like that.</p>
<p>Uh, that means nothing, for this thread is talking about lay prestige, which by definition, is prestige as defined by regular people. Not about the opinions of a particular (and quite small and elite) cohort, concentrated in the Northeast. Let’s not play games - the fact is, the LAC’s suffer from a paucity of lay prestige.</p>
<p>Now, do I think that’s fair? Do I think that’s right? I do not - and in fact, I have always been a strong proponents of the LAC’s. I think the LAC’s deserve more prestige and more attention from high school seniors. But whether we like it or not, the truth of the matter is that the LAC’s lack lay prestige. Would you truly care to argue otherwise? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Um, not to inject an excessive degree of my background into the discussion, but I did not grow up on the West Coast, and I am not on the West Coast now. Yet the fact is, even where I did grow up and where I am now (which shall remain unmentioned), far more people have heard of Berkeley than of most LAC’s. </p>
<p>Look, the LAC’s are big in YOUR mind because you clearly happen to belong to a particular cohort that is deeply steeped in the educational culture. Good for you. But the truth is, regular people are not like that, and whether we like it or not, regular people define lay prestige. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You’re kidding right? The truth is, (most) companies wouldn’t interview them both. They offer interviews to whoever happens to pass their initial screens, which usually takes the college name (among other factors) into account. No company has the resources to interview every single candidate in the world. </p>
<p>Now, again, is that fair? Is that right? That’s not for me to say. However, it is an undeniable truth that certain colleges offer paths to recruitment that others do not. Fair or not fair, that’s how it is.</p>
<p>Well then that begs the question: are those skills transferable? If they were, then why exactly do so many liberal arts grads find themselves in mundane jobs that, frankly, don’t really need college training? I used to work for a company where every single secretary had a college degree, with some holding master’s. You don’t really need a college degree to answer phones, make coffee, and file documents. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Again, in the last few years, around nearly half of all graduates of the top schools who enter the workforce have chosen consulting and banking. </p>
<p>Now, to be clear, not everybody enters the workforce, and as you have pointed out, many undergrads do indeed enter grad school. But those grad schools are usually of the professional sort: law school, med school, policy school, in rare cases business school (which usually requires work experience, nevertheless, a few undergrads are able to enter B-school straight). Or they take master’s degrees in those subjects. But even those students often times wind up in consulting or banking. For example, one only has to note the high percentage of MIT engineering master’s students who end up as consultants or bankers. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I believe you’ve just contradicted yourself, for you’ve just identified the crux of the problem: as you said, academia is indeed a tough nut to crack and one may indeed have to suffer miserable pay as a gypsy scholar. Why would people want to do that, when they could instead enjoy a nice lucrative career as a consultant, banker, lawyer, doctor, manager, or the myriad other potential high-paying careers they could have? </p>
<p>But don’t take my word for it. I’ll let others speak for me:</p>
<p>Well, let’s be frank. The truth of the matter is that there are far more students at the top schools such as Harvard or MIT who come from leafy rich suburbs than are 1st generation poverty-stricken immigrants. Yet, as I pointed out, a large percentage of those students will take jobs in consulting or banking (or head for preprofessional grad school such as law or medicine). </p>
<p>Consider MIT, arguably the world’s premier engineering school. One would think that if any student body ought to be the most likely to be satisfied with the career track of the engineering profession, it would be the student body at MIT, and indeed the majority of MIT undergrads are engineering students. Yet the fact remains that nearly half of all MIT students who enter the workforce take jobs in consulting and banking (and many others who go on to grad school will thereupon enter consulting and banking). </p>
<p>To invoke the words of Nicholas Pearce:</p>
<p>*Even at M.I.T., the U.S.'s premier engineering school, the traditional career path has lost its appeal for some students. Says junior Nicholas Pearce, a chemical-engineering major from Chicago: “It’s marketed as–I don’t want to say dead end but sort of ‘O.K., here’s your role, here’s your lab, here’s what you’re going to be working on.’ Even if it’s a really cool product, you’re locked into it.” Like Gao, Pearce is leaning toward consulting. “If you’re an M.I.T. grad and you’re going to get paid $50,000 to work in a cubicle all day–as opposed to $60,000 in a team setting, plus a bonus, plus this, plus that–it seems like a no-brainer.” *</p>
<p>This is a topic that I’ve discussed at length on other sections of CC (and you’re welcome to search through my back posts). The summary is that engineering jobs simply don’t pay that well and don’t offer particularly fast promotion tracks relative to other career tracks, and especially for students at the top engineering schools. I wish they did, but they do not. Engineering salaries start off high, but don’t offer much room for growth: you rarely see an engineer even with decades of experience making more than $125-150k. Ariesathena, a former CC contributor who quit her engineering job for law school, remarked that her old engineering colleagues congratulated her when she quit, for they knew she would make more in her first year right out of law school than even the most experienced engineers at the company. </p>
<p>To be fair, engineers can make far more than $150k by becoming managers. But the key is that they have to shift away from pure engineering. Incidentally, this is why the top full-time MBA programs have such large cohorts of former engineers, usually comprising 25-40% of the entering class. If engineering companies offered better career tracks, those engineers wouldn’t feel the need to quit their jobs to attend B-school. </p>
<p>I leave you with the example of Ankur Luthra, Berkeley’s first Rhodes Scholar since the 1980’s and one of the few who was an engineering student. He’s never worked a day in his life as an actual engineer, despite arguably being the best undergrad engineer that Berkeley has ever produced. Instead, he worked briefly as a program manager at Microsoft, finished his Rhodes Oxford master’s, earned his MBA at Harvard Business School, then become a venture capitalist. </p>
<p>The upshot is that the best engineering students in the country increasingly do not want to actually work as engineers, and hence engineering is increasingly becoming a career for only those students who weren’t good enough to do other things. Sad but true. </p>
<p>*…by the year 2000, students with just an undergraduate degree who went into banking made $10,000 a year more than those going into engineering. For post graduates, the gap was even higher. Overall, by the 2000’s, financiers were making 30 - 50% higher wages on average than others with the same level of education, skill and other relevant characteristics.</p>
<pre><code>It was like we faced a banking black hole-sucking in many of the good young minds of several generations - never to be seen again in the classrooms of schools, hospital wards, engineering firms, or solar cell manufacturing firms…*
</code></pre>
<p>To be clear, I do not support what is happening. I find it sad that many of the best engineering minds would rather choose other careers such as banking. But I’m not sure how it could change. Engineering companies refuse to boost their pay and their promotion tracks, and as long as they refuse, many of the best minds will continue to choose other careers.</p>
<p>Pure prestige huh? From MA:
Harvard
MIT/Caltech
Yale
Princeton
Stanford
Dartmouth
Columbia
Brown
William
Amherst
Penn (as being dragged up by Wharton)
Duke
Swarthmore
Cornell
Chicago
JHU
…</p>
<p>Sakky,you’ve suggested that the skills in question (“to tailor solutions for customer requirements, to analyze alternative approaches, to package presentations backed by reliable metrics, and to ‘think outside the box’”, etc.) are not being taught in CS courses. Now you also are suggesting that they are not transferable skills picked up in liberal arts and science courses, either.</p>
<p>So where do you think they are being taught, if at all? Do your highly paid ibankers and consultants just pick them up by osmosis? Do you think they come into college with them already developed (so, college is simply performing a “filtering and selection” function, not an educational or even a training function)? Or do they not matter for success (or for anything in life at all)?</p>
<p>I understand that many of America’s most profitable firms are run as shell companies. They outsource all production. I suppose they may even outsource their thinking. The federal government identifies or manufactures crisis situations all over the globe. Then it lets out huge contracts to consulting firms, who in turn outsource the “solution” to people on the ground who build things, run things, or die trying. If you are saying that a small handful of schools has a narrow door into these lucrative, derivative processes (disaster capitalism, or the parallel world of venture capitalism), you may be right. </p>
<p>What I think you’re describing is something like this: “prestige” is a signal by the top N schools (N being quite small) to the brightest high school students, whose matriculation in turn signals their potential for the most lucrative consulting jobs. They spend 4 years to acquire a smattering of knowledge in CS, biochemistry, engineering, or economics. Then they become well-paid consultants in the venture capital industry, selling high concept “solutions” to immature or troubled companies (which seldom seem to produce anything of lasting value), or in the disaster capital industry, selling high concept solutions to cities and countries that never seem to emerge fully out of crisis (e.g. 20-something Republican operatives pushing the flat tax under Paul Bremer in Baghdad). Quite a racket.</p>
<p>Alexandre:
“I agree Coolbrezze, Stanford, along with HYP and MIT is one of America’s 5 universities that has a strong national (and international) reputation. Cal and Columbia come close too.”</p>
<p>“I must agree sakky. Stanford is not associated with football. It may be with athletics and Tiger Woods. Hell, even the Marching Band is famous/notorious. But people think Stanford, they seldom think of football.”</p>
<p>Stanford football: John Elway, Bill Walsh, Jim Plunkett, Jim Harbaugh, Toby Gerhart, Bob Mathias, etc. Other people laymen associate with Stanford: Ah, Herbert Hoover? Condi Rice? Chelsea Clinton?</p>
<p>''I don’t think the average laymen knows, much less cares, that Hoover, Rice, Clinton, etc. went to Stanford… ‘’</p>
<p>That’s exactly my point…that among the “laymen” its academic reputation isn’t nearly as widely known as a lot of people here seem to think it is, and that its athletic (especially football) reputation eclipses its academic reputation.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, Condi Rice got her BS and PhD from University of Denver plus a Masters from Notre Dame. She’s been on the faculty at Stanford though.</p>
<p>I hope this is not a stupidity contest. The statements above can only make me think twice about Michigan. Just for your information, 32% of the job-bound graduates of Harvard from last year could not find jobs upon graduation.</p>
<p>When Edison died, people tried to honor him by trying to shutdown the lights, only found out it was impossible. If we scratch Stanford from earth, we may need to turn down the internet and google. But we scratch Notre Dame from earth, this could only make those at Purdue or Indiana to be drunk for two more days.</p>
<p>“I hope this is not a stupidity contest. The statements above can only make me think twice about Michigan. Just for your information, 32% of the job-bound graduates of Harvard from last year could not find jobs upon graduation.”</p>
<p>What statements “above” are you referring to that would make you, “think twice about Michigan?”</p>
<p>^^^Who said that? That’s complete nonsense. Stanford is highly thought of throughout the entire country, including Michigan. I believe you are a bit confused by who said what. The original quote was by a student who is currently attending/accepted at Stanford and is from Maryland.</p>
<p>A great majority of people I’ve ever run into, from all walks of life, are aware of almost all of the Ivies and Stanford, MIT, and possibly Duke. Schools like Chicago, Rice, and WashU do fall under the radar I believe.</p>
<p>Where I live in Indiana, the only schools that are properly recognized are HYP. MIT is occasionally known, and Duke and Stanford are known, but only as sports schools. Schools like Chicago are virtually unknown. I did hear someone mention the prestige of Chicago in a small bar in rural Indiana, and I was pretty shocked.</p>
<p>I was shocked that he knew Chicago was a prestigious school. I’m an attending student, and the only one on my Dad’s side of the family who knew of Chicago was a lawyer, who of course was familiar with it due to Chicago’s status as a top 10 (5?) law school. On my mom’s side, only my grandmother knew of it, but she works at a pharmaceutical company in a pretty high position and hence personally knows a few alumni. Of the ‘laymen’ I know, not one had heard of Chicago before I started attending, and I still think most of my family members think I attend a state school.</p>
<p>In terms of true laymen, which I guess I would say is below 75th percentile in %measure<em>of</em>social_status, I’m unaware of anyone who knows any schools outside HYPM (and perhaps Berkeley) that excel in academics. (Laymen are often aware of the Ivy League but don’t know what schools are in the Ivy League.)</p>
<p>(Saying ‘laymen’ as a noun and not an adjective sounds terribly pretentious, doesn’t it?)</p>