"Look at the percentage of recruits who go into PE, Hedge funds and VC and Harvard just kills every other school, prestigious or not, specially for undergraduate level analyst jobs. This is not even a fair fight. I don’t care two hoots about “Harvard” per se. In fact I think there are a lot of schools including Chicago where a child can get a much better education. If the recruiting practices at these employers were more <> “holistic”, I wouldn’t give two cents about Harvard or its ilk, but that is not the case. The profile of analysts at these firms is as “uniform” as you can possibly get. "
So the real reason that you’re upset about the admissions practices that you don’t like, is that it puts unnecessary roadblocks (or perhaps insurmountable roadblocks) in the way of *your * kid getting to work in private equity / hedge funds / venture capital. I agree, that IS awful! I think you should draw this to the attention of Congress right away. I’ve changed my mind – Joe and Jane Average ARE going to be terribly upset when they hear this. There will be a mass revolt of people wanting to change this awful system. Imagine, the “right” kids aren’t getting into private equity firms!
It’s almost as though you’re fearful that if your kid can’t do one of those things, he / she won’t be able to achieve a perfectly fine upper middle class life. Open your eyes and look around you. If your stated goal is money, there are plenty of people in plenty of fields who do just fine, and not all of them went to Ivy / similar schools. The continued fetish of those fields on CC is over-the-top.
You know, I would have had more respect for your reasoning if you had at least said that it was about the education. That your child would be able to contribute to scientific knowledge or whatever at an elite school better than at a non-elite one.
But it’s pretty transparent now. Your cat is out of the bag. You see the big pots of money at the end of the rainbow and you’re just upset you don’t have an iron-clad guarantee that your kid has a shot.
@al2simon I work in the industry too and recruit too, so I also know what I am talking about. All you have said is that school name is a “necessary” but not sufficient condition to get recruited into these firms. I have never said it is a “necessary” as well as a “sufficient” condition. So there is no conflict here.
Here is some research on this topic by Lauren Rivera
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Great attitude. Lol on saying that your pups were true deserving geniuses that got accepted. My experience has been when somebody even imagines that someone else thinks that their kid actually deserves to go to an elite school, the proverbial s***t hits the fan. So kudos to you for bravely embracing your kid’s merit."
My kids “deserved” to go to elite schools insofar as they were in the running from a grades / GPA / EC standpoint. But they didn’t “deserve” that in the sense that it was owed to them, or that any of the elite schools were obligated to reserve them a place.
I’m sorry, I am still laughing here over the fact that your ire is that you don’t have a guaranteed path for your undoubtedly-smart kid into a private-equity firm! Yeah, whose dream is THAT? I might suggest that it’s yours.
Are you new to the country? That’s the only way I can possibly believe that you don’t understand that there are many, many paths to upper middle class comfortable living and PE/VC/HF are only some of them.
That’s not “all” that I said. Far from it (said with my usual modesty )
If you work in one of these industries then you would know that Rivera’s article has a pretty high crap-to-content ratio.
You can’t really believe that you hire in the superficial way that Rivera describes. If you do, then you should stop and find someone else to do the hiring.
The days of hiring Biff and Muffy because they went to the right school, summered in the right places, and played a mean game of golf are long gone.
"Actually we are, An app is read in less than 15 minutes, in many cases less than that. These Adcoms read thousands of apps, from morning to night during the admissions cycle. After a while it all gets blurry. "
What do you propose they do about it? Tell kids (except for your kid, of course) not to apply?
Or are you suggesting that they set some minimum (if you don’t have a 3.7 and a 32 on your ACT, let’s say, don’t bother applying)? They’re still going to have umpteen thousand applications to deal with, though.
“You place too much faith in a severely flawed system. Worse, you seem to judge the efficacy of how well the kid showed it by looking at the outcome. The kid who got in showed it in spades. The kid who did not must have been terrible at it.”
I think you are wildly misinterpreting how the elites feel about the kids that they don’t accept. They make it abundantly clear that there are more “deserving” kids than they have spaces for, and that being rejected by them isn’t the stamp of You’re A Big Fat Loser – it just means that these also-great kids are going to go onto different institutions and do well there.
Why are you so fearful of outcomes beyond the top 20? Why do you seriously not get that there are great schools and opportunities outside that level? **Why do you seriously not get that there are PLENTY of comfortable upper middle class parents – who are then able to send their own kids to school full-pay! - who never come within spitting distance of a private equity / hedge fund / venture capital job? **
“There you are ready to bend over backward and entertain all kinds of reasons for why a kids academics could be “less than stellar”.”
On aggregate, though, these institutions admit kids whose academics ARE stellar. I mean, you just couldn’t get much higher if you tried on their mean ACT / SAT scores. You’re trying to portray it as if Harvard et al is taking all the second-rans and justifying it because they are legacies or whatever. Sorry, there is just no way you can look at the Common Data Set and say that they are admitting an “inferior” pool of students. Moreover, their numbers tend to increase year after year.
It’s very clear these schools admit the creme de la creme of students. Isn’t that why you want your child there in the first place – you know, for the academic experience with like-minded intellectual peers (and not for anything as crass as a slot in PE?).
“Pile on the relish with judgement on others priorities and values”
Who says we can’t judge others’ priorities and values?
If someone came on here and said - my priority is getting my kid into the school with the best football team, regardless of the academics - both you and I would indeed judge it as inferior to someone whose priority is getting a kid into a school with good academics.
My priority was getting my kids into very good schools so they could have excellent educations they could always fall back on. It so happened they both got into their top choices, but the schools we looked at ranged across the board in (roughly) the top 40 USNWR lists. And any one of them would have been just fine. Really. It would not have been the end of any world if they hadn’t gotten into their first choice schools. I have more confidence in the world and things working out. Really, the kid who winds up at Tufts or Kenyon or Carnegie-Mellon is going to be just* fine. * He’s not going to be flipping burgers, and he’ll do just fine even if he’s not in the sacred PE/VC/HF world. Honest.
You know what they say about opinions … Sorry. I generally give more credibility to faculty members at well known top tier universities who publish their work in reputed journals with consulting editors who have degrees from equally reputed universities, specially when her research aligns perfectly with what I see in real life. Otherwise if I would have to believe every paper on climate science had a high crap to content ratio, because you know, somebody out there believes that.
Hahaha, the Buffy and Muffy line was genuinely funny. Lets talk again when you see 50% of the incoming class at one of these firms is outside the top 3-4 target schools.
I’m repeating exactly what you said. You said - it’s not that you care about Harvard per se; in fact, you suspect there are other places one could get an equal or better education. But look at the pipeline into PE/HF/VC; it’s very skewed to Harvard and similar places – and if you don’t go there, your chances of getting in are slim to none.
So then I repeated * exactly what you said * - you’re upset about these admissions practices because (assuming your kid is hurt by them) it puts roadblocks in the way of your kid getting to work in PE/HF/VC.
Please don’t tell me what’s on your mind and then blast me for having a “magic crystal ball” mind reader.
If, indeed, you meant to say – there are amazing educational opportunities (labs, professors, etc.) at these schools and my kid’s education would be sub-optimized if he were not able to take advantage of these things, and quite possibly society would suffer as a result, then it seems to me you would have said just that.
Honestly, if you met me in person, you’d know that I am saying these things in an “inquiring” tone and not a “challenging” one, though it’s sometimes hard to convey that online. I know we all want the best for our kids. I get it. We all do. And we all use whatever advantages we have.
If you work in the PE arena, chances are you’re pretty affluent already, and your kids are already on third base. In which case – really, honestly, they’ll be fine. You don’t need to have all the angst over a certain set of schools. If you object to their practices, you don’t have to play their game at all. It’s nowhere near necessary.
Plenty of people don’t work in the PE world, don’t agonize over getting their kids on that track, and you know something? They sit in first-class right next to them anyway. This is a world of limitless opportunity.
@VeryLuckyParent- isn’t your kid going to UChicago this fall? And you also posted about the possibilities of merit for your other kid?
You did appear really really happy about your kid getting off the Waitlist at UChicago and now you seem really bitter about something. You’ve been posting a lot of discussions that get people riled up.
Take a deep breath, it will be OK with your kids. And if you really want to help those that don’t have a chance at the elites, go volunteer somewhere that could really use you- a kid could use a tutor or an encouragement out there.
@goingnutsmom I AM very happy I think UChicago is a great school. And I do think my kids will do just fine. I am ** not bitter** about anything!!! but I do have an opinion. I think everybody is allowed to have that and share it, provided they are civil about it.
Why do some people believe that everything I post is somehow personal?? I just don’t get that. I am just calling it the way I see it
Honestly, I fail to understand how discussing something can get people riled up, unless people have really thin skin. I have strong views on some issues on college admissions. Others have equally strong views. Great. I don’t get riled up because somebody says, they disagree with me. I don’t start insinuating their motives. I just say “Uh, they have a different perspective on life” It does seem to me that some people have “sacred cows”. You talk about their sacred cows and they get triggered!! and all hell breaks lose, even if you try your best to just stick to the issue at hand.
The number of Harvard graduates going into private equity funds isn’t necessarily a strong point for Harvard. My kids had four pretty close friends who went to Harvard, and at this point they are 5-7 years post-graduation and two are working at private equity funds and one is at McKinsey. The fourth just graduated from law school, and I don’t know what he’s doing. Honestly, it’s a huge disappointment. They were really gifted kids. Three of them were very STEM-oriented, and the fourth (now one of the PE people) was a history major with a secondary concentration in studio art who won a top prize for his honors thesis. The McKinsey person dropped out of an MD/PhD program to work there. (“Dropped out” may be a bit much. She got her PhD, but passed on finishing her MD.) They are all people I thought would be doing something more meaningful than making a lot of money for themselves by helping the rich get richer. I honestly think something in the culture at Harvard told them that these were the careers they should be pursuing, not the science or history they wanted to do when they started college.
I can’t catch up with the debate going on on this thread. You all are so much faster and more eloquent! But @VeryLuckyParent I hear you, and I agree with you everything said here doesn’t have to be taken so personal. Sometimes, an opinion is just an opinion, and the holder of the opinion doesn’t have to have vested interest or occasionally they can even vote again their own interest! It seems many people don’t think that’s possible… Back to topic, I agree that the top 3-4 colleges do open doors to certain fields (or at little open them wider compared with other colleges). It means 1) since those are only a few small fields that appeal to a small population, most people probably won’t be affected by not attending those few colleges; and 2) I assume it’s true that (as @al2simon pointed out) once people have moved beyond their first job, their college name is playing a smaller and smaller role in their career development. That being said, I personally think for those who do end up staying in those few more exclusive fields, first job is a big leg up.
@VeryLuckyParent: if it helps, I happen to know a great many people who work in private equity, venture capital and hedge funds and I can assure you that (contrary to what it sounds like you’ve been told) the vast majority did not graduate from Harvard College. Sure, plenty of people in those fields, if they have MBAs, got them at top-10 business schools (including Harvard, Wharton, Chicago Booth and others), but they got their bachelor’s degrees at a broad range of universities first (and then typically worked as analysts at big banks, all of which recruit at colleges and universities around the country). Coming from UChicago, your kid is very well-positioned to get onto the on-ramp for these fields; whether they do or not depends a lot more on what they make of themselves at UChicago than the fact that they’re not at Harvard. There are, in fact, internships at various investment banks specifically reserved for UChicago students, according to the UChicago Career Advancement Office’s website. Every kid recruited from UChicago to a job at a big bank (and there are many every year) has beaten out scores of kids from Harvard who applied to the same bank and didn’t get an interview.
You nailed it, @JHS. That’s also the point made in the book “Excellent Sheep” and why I’m glad my kid isn’t looking at Ivies. You come in intellectually alive and leave a consultant or investment banker through some kind of voodoo (and i am not referring to those who are called to those professions out of genuine interest).
Thank you, JHS. I find it personally depressing that an elite education is valued primarily because without it, one might not get into a PE fund. It says that the person just wants the “stamp,” not the education.
Btw I have a nephew who went to Princeton, Goldman Sachs and now a PE firm. Sure, he makes a lot of money for a 25 yo but frankly, I’m unimpressed. They aren’t the ones doing the creating or inventing.
I consider my kids’ experience at elite schools “worth it” even if it didn’t translate into one dollar more than what they would have made coming out of our big state flagship.
Seriously, you know who, this is what you see as adult conversation? I say a kid can show dimension and- after admitiing you don’t know- again you tell us how it works?
Is this just batting practice? Yanking our chains?
)
I think UChicago is a great school. And I do think my kids will do just fine. I am ** not bitter** about anything!!! but I do have an opinion. I think everybody is allowed to have that and share it, provided they are civil about it.