<p>Each and every college offers endless possibilities.</p>
<p>I think this is the most important statement. You just can’t definitively compare an experience that shaped a person to an experience the person didn’t actually have. I think it’s relatively safe to say that Harvard might offer more opportunities than many schools, but that there are lots of [very intelligent] people who would hate getting up in the morning at Harvard, therefore causing their opportunities to narrow immensely. It’s also narrow-minded to believe that one’s own formative experiences therefore leave those who haven’t had such experiences unformed or wrongly formed.</p>
<p>CUlater21- Not sure what your point is. If you are commenting about my grammar…that usage is called the past unreal conditional and is used when you want to describe something you would have done differently.</p>
<p>I still stand by my comment that emotional intelligence is a key component to success in life…flexibility, seeing other peoples’ viewpoints, respecting others…with these qualities one can “make it anywhere” be it an Ivy league college, a corporation, hey even a college website like cc</p>
<p>As a phd holder and reknowned in my field (and my spouse and most friends are academics)…this is common knowledge to everyone I know. None of us would waste money on a selective ug but instead find one of many great publics to do research in ones field. Save the top school for grad work! </p>
<p>Was at an awards luncheon of alumni in my field who had previously won a particular research career award. Every single one of us had gone to our local state for undergrad. I thought it interesting but if you actually know how academics works from the inside, it’s not remotely surprising to me.</p>
<p>I should add there is a HUGE difference between getting a phd (frankly anyone can get one if they look for a school that will take them, some programs are a complete joke and some will push anyone through), getting an academic job afterwards (many fields are extremely difficult to get hired into a tenure track job and most phd holders work in industry) and becoming well known in ones field (hard to get published and vast majority of papers get zero citations)</p>
<p>starbright-
The elite schools produce the most PhDs per capita. There have been many posts along these lines by interesteddad and myself.</p>
<p>school, PhDs produced in physical sci, comp sci, math 1995-2006, bachelors degrees granted 2002-2004 in same fields, ratio</p>
<p>1 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 400 198 2.020
2 YALE UNIVERSITY 301 197 1.528
3 CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 434 288 1.507
4 REED COLLEGE 136 102 1.333
5 OBERLIN COLLEGE 157 136 1.154
6 RICE UNIVERSITY 275 240 1.146
7 CARLETON COLLEGE 240 240 1.000
8 FRANKLIN AND MARSHALL COLLEGE 104 105 0.990
9 HARVARD UNIVERSITY 627 649 0.966
10 HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE 238 249 0.956
11 UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 341 373 0.914
12 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE 104 117 0.889
13 OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE 71 90 0.789
14 SUNY COLL OF ENVIRON SCI & FORESTRY 18 23 0.783
15 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 195 256 0.762
16 CORNELL UNIVERSITY 555 745 0.745
17 LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY 58 78 0.744
18 BOWDOIN COLLEGE 80 108 0.741
19 MASSACHUSETTS INST. OF TECHNOLOGY 821 1115 0.736
20 POMONA COLLEGE 84 116 0.724 </p>
<p>If you and your colleagues turned back the clock and went to an average college, there might have been fewer of you sitting at the awards dinner.</p>
<p>The great publics like Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin, UVA… well they are excellent schools and a lot of their graduates go on for PhDs, professional school, and so on. Not all states have great public flagship universities. In New York, your best option is an excellent private school.</p>
<p>starbright, I am a former academic – I taught at Harvard – and based upon where my Harvard and MIT colleagues are sending their kids, I am confident that they don’t share the belief you espoused (i.e., that you’d never waste their money on a selective UG school). Well, they would share the belief that you should send your kids to a less selective school or a state school if you want but don’t seem to be doing so for their own kids. </p>
<p>I think there are a few reasons for this. First, even in academia, being blessed by the appropriate high priests makes a difference and the benefits of those blessings can be cumulative. Second, they don’t think their kids will (or should) all become academics. The value of signal sent by the brand (created in part by the selectivity) is high in some fields outside of academia. A friend who is a partner in a high-end consulting firm told me that his firm interviews at the Ivies, Amherst, Williams, Stanford, CalTech and MIT. They don’t appear to interview at any state universities. [They will hire kids from elsewhere but it is a lot harder to get in]. Third, they may think that their kids are enriched by having lots of very smart classmates. And fourth and fifth are horizons and contacts, which I mentioned in an earlier post. These are likely help outside of academia and perhaps within academia as well.</p>
<p>I don’t believe that one should only try to send kids to selective undergraduate colleges or that the prestige of a selective UG school is a be-all and end-all, but I am confident that not all academics share your view or experience.</p>
<p>I’m not sure that this article is in any way valuable. Random anecdotes don’t contribute anything valuable to the conversation. Anybody can find some crazy story to ‘support’ their point of view on a topic, but in reality, it is useless. The list that collegehelp posted above, in that it involves statistics for ALL students, not 6, is infinitely more valuable than the original post.</p>
<p>xiggi, I noticed the interesting k and awkward word choices, but I figure that anybody who is a renowned academic probably has better things to do than edit carefully on an online post, so I cut him/her some slack.</p>
<p>bigp9998, I agree. Definitions of success are not clear, but even assuming renown in academia is the goal, no one knows what would have happened if we sent those same six sibs to more selective schools. Even collegehelp’s list provides no meaningful help with the causal inference that people like collegehelp are trying to make and with which people like starbright disagree, which seems to be that sending kids to more selective schools would lead to greater success as academics. As the top-ranking school on the list above, does Princeton add to the success its alumni would achieve if they’d gone someplace else or does Princeton just get better kids to begin with and provide no value-added? His list doesn’t shed light on what I think is the original question.</p>
<p>That’s also a very good point, shawbridge. While I do personally feel that elite schools make a major difference in the lives of their students in comparison to lower-ranked and states schools, I absolutely understand the opposite point of view: that the same student would do very well in either school. I do however, feel that most students grow tremendously at elite schools in ways that they do not at (most) state schools. This is not something that can be reflected by college GPA or any other measurable statistic; just my own opinion.</p>
<p>Seems a lot like religion–you just have to believe. Those who believe they’ve purchased something ineffably, indefinably but indisputably superior with their elite ug degrees will never be dissuaded. It can’t be proved or disproved but those who believe will keep on believing. Grubby things like facts will not, cannot get in the way of the true faith. I’m all in favor of getting the finest possible education and I know that can happen in many places. I’m increasingly convinced, though, that there is something a little sick and pathetic going on here–a desperate belief, bolstered by endless statistics, in the long-term value of the prestigious degree (who can be surprised that the highest # of Phd’s per capita come from schools that carefully select their students at the outset–and how many people who’ve actually grown up and left the academic world still believe that the# of Phd’s per capita is a meaningful measure of anything?) I think a lot of people who put their faith in this religion will find disappointment in a world where most don’t share the worldview of the CC true believers.</p>
<p>You mean the world where a huge portion of the population has not heard of Williams, Amherst, Pomona, the University of Chicago, or Swarthmore and assumes they are community colleges far inferior to the likes of Georgia, Ohio State, and UConn?</p>
<p>Yes, FLVADAD, that is no doubt the case, but it trivializes a sensible question and misses the ultimate point. The question is whether the prestigious institutions or a subset of them add value beyond their selection process. I don’t think any of the anecdotes or data presented shed light on that question. </p>
<p>I can think of several ways in which these institutions might have an effect above and beyond their selection process.</p>
<p>One question is whether as a result of the education, experiences, contacts, horizons that a school offers, kids who go to the set of schools in question are changed in a way that enables them to be more successful in the world, however success is defined for the purpose of the question.</p>
<p>A second question is whether the world treats kids who go to these schools better in such a way that over time they are more successful. By analogy, people treat attractive people better and tend to attribute better motives to them. These people develop higher self-esteem, etc., and this may lead to better results over time. Do people treat Yale graduates better, interpret their remarks differently, in such a way that there is an advantage over time?</p>
<p>vossron, I think the problem is that the statistics do not shed light on the question that people would like to answer, so that they end up stating their beliefs and unwittingly finding data to provide the appearance of support for their beliefs, even though they don’t.</p>
<p>At my ex’s thanksgiving table there are more folks with Ph’d than without. Perhaps family/cultural values help determine one’s likelihood to strive or aspire to higher levels of education. </p>
<p>The Kid growing up at that table will pick up verbal tenor, assumptions and norms that a kid who’s family does not have that expectation.</p>
<p>It’s not function of race or economic disparity - its a question of the sort of discussion that happen around the dinner (or thanksgiving) table. </p>
<p>We parents have the responsible to mold that conversation - from a very early age.</p>
<p>I would keep in mind that for many institutions, selection for scholarship or honors programs is fully as rigorous as that for “top” schools, and that the programs often promise perks such as specialized advising, small honors classes taught by full professors rather than large intro classes, or opportunities for undergrad research and publication, that are not available to the general student population. Students at these honors programs often turn down offers from “better” schools because of these perks. </p>
<p>In turn, these types of programs can provide excellent preparation for all types of graduate education, and good graduate programs tend to realize this and do not seem to discriminate against this type of graduate in their admissions policies. Many students who know they are bound for graduate or professional schools deliberately seek out these opportunities and spurn admission to more “prestigious” schools both because it will be easier to stand above the crowd and access specialized opportunities (essential to an application to a top graduate program), and because of their lower costs (attractive to those who expect to enter law school or medical school.)</p>
<p>It is not clear whether or not these types of benefits also apply to those who seek to enter the workforce directly upon completing an undergraduate degree. And, the presence of “honors dorms” as an additional enticement to students at many of these schools indicates that at least some students attracted by the perks to schools they would have otherwise overlooked have qualms about fitting in socially with the larger student body.</p>