When I was a kid I used to wonder why anyone in their right mind would want to live in NYC because my only image of it came from West Side Story.
“[see, ladies], with false forms/You deceive men, but cannot deceive worms.”
“La bufera infernal, che mai non resta,/mena li spirti con la sua rapina;/voltando e percotendo li molesta.”
"(1) There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens…
19 Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath[c]; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. 20 All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. 21 Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”
“The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?”
“I am afraid we have eyes bigger than our stomachs, and more curiosity than capacity. We embrace everything, but we clasp only wind.”
“If he had thought he would live, he would not have said it in such a coldly offensive tone. If he had not known he would die, how could he not have pitied her, how could he have said it in front of her! The only explanation could be that it made no difference because something else, more important, had been revealed to him.”
FWIW, I clicked maybe about 10 names on this list and found that 7 out of those 10 graduated from elite colleges (Columbia, Penn, Oxford, Harvard, Boston College, etc.)
Sure, ultimately if your S/D really like the fit, then it should be a high priority school to consider for attendance. That said, it also should be done with the reality that say you went to Ft. Lewis in Durango, CO (beautiful area of the country) but wanted to join the foreign service at some point,well, they would have to do a bit more work to create an access point to such a career. But, yes, its what is the best fit for the aspiring student.
“But I think one thing that always confuses people in these discussions is that there isn’t a small group of elite colleges, and then a steep dropoff to a much lower tier. Rather, it’s a relatively gentle slope, and there isn’t that much difference in eliteness between #5 and #55. There is some difference, yes, but it is a gradual difference.”
I think this is very well said.
not worth it
Alrighty then.
Re boolaHI’s anecdote: I have a resume like that. I know other people who have resumes like that. Including people who live in the Southwest. I don’t know anyone like that who has had serious trouble getting a job. The Southwest is a big Stanford market. For heaven’s sake, Sandra Day and Bill Rehnquist went from Stanford Law School to Phoenix and had perfectly nice careers, even if she had a lot of trouble getting a job at first.
Here’s where the rabbit went into the hat: " . . . other than the larger firms in town . . . " Of course. If you move across the country mid-career, and you are moving into the private sector from a mid-level government job that doesn’t give you the pull of ex-Senators (or ex-chiefs of staff to Senators or Secretaries), then you probably don’t have a guaranteed, self-sustaining book of business that you are bringing with you. And that fact alone is going to cut out all but the largest firms, because a small firm (like mine) can’t afford to hire a superstar who isn’t essentially self-financing. When we hire partner-level people, with very few exceptions, we are not so much offering to pay them something as selling them management services, support, fellowship, and cross-marketing opportunities. They are giving us as little of their revenue as they can get us to accept for those things. Only the large firms can take on a spec project like a guy with big credentials and no clients, and only the large firms have a large base of clients that is willing to pay a premium for those credentials, too.
@musicprnt, actually state schools (the top ones, anyway) tend to have an even more preprofessional student body than the private elites.
Also, with the societal change in China, that has definite not been a place where what you can accomplish (or at least earn) has been limited by what college you go to.
In any case, carry on.
239:
ahem
Fixed that for you.
(Also: Six figures always sounds impressive until you run salary:cost of living ratios. I do wish people throwing around salary numbers on this thread would start doing that. Please.)
It’s fairly obvious that most Americans measure success primarily in terms of one’s income/assets. Given that the median US household income is in the $50K range, it’s easy to see why making 7 figures seems like something positive. I don’t think people who view success in terms of money are “juvenile” as PG says. These folks see $$$ as making their lives easier. It even happens to smart, upper-middle class kids. That’s why they want to get those Goldman Sachs jobs. Money is a powerful motivator for people across all socio-economic levels.
Final comment–it would be disingenuous if I didn’t say there were times when H and I saw the benefits of H working long ridiculous stress-filled hours and traveling for business almost every week. One benefit was that we could easily pay full tuition for his kids and our kids at Tufts, Georgetown (MBA), Oxford, Bryn Mawr, Case Western Reserve (undergrad and graduate accounting degrees), Kalamazoo College, and one final MFA program coming up. But, as good as we feel about having provided educational opportunities for these offspring, it came with a price.
@dfbdfb If you’re implying that teachers are working all summer without pay, you are mistaken.
Even in a high cost area, six figures ain’t too shabby. Add in benefits worth tens of thousands more and you have a well paid person by anyone’s definition.
[QUOTE=""]
attending and graduating from an elite school will tend to maximize your options as opposed to a less elite school.
[/QUOTE]
Hunt, in the abstract, I agree with that sentiment.
But in the real world, it is a bit tricky.
For example, if your kid has a free ride at University of Alabama .vs. full pay at Brown, what would you do?
Is she better off with an UG degree from Brown .vs. an UG degree from UAB but a $250K head start in her bank account. I assume that $250K does give your kid some extra options too - ahhh… very vexing!
@Chardo, no, six figures isn’t shabby…for a job that generally requires graduate-level education. But the implication of the post was that six-figure salaries for teachers was the norm, and it isn’t, even on Long Island (which has by far the highest pay for teachers in all of New York State, which is itself a high teacher pay state).
And many teachers do work at least part of the summer without pay.
My kids were full pay, but if they had gone to somewhere with a free ride, they wouldn’t have had that money in THEIR bank accounts. But your point is well taken.
@furrydog point taken, but to clarify, UAB is Alabama-Birmingham, not University of Alabama. I assume you meant to say UA, but some might not make the distinction.
@shawbridge, I in general agree with the gist of what you’re saying, but I think the examples you gave are poor. Yes, Stanford is tops for everything in the Bay Area, but the options for a CS major from UW-Madison actually won’t be all that much worse in quality than a CS major at Stanford.
And for finance, Haas at UC-Berkeley is actual as much a target as those Ivies you listed.
“For example, if your kid has a free ride at University of Alabama .vs. full pay at Brown, what would you do?
Is she better off with an UG degree from Brown .vs. an UG degree from UAB but a $250K head start in her bank account. I assume that $250K does give your kid some extra options too - ahhh… very vexing!”
Like Hunt, I don’t consider the $ I’m spending on college to be fungible in that it goes to the kid either way. If one of my kids had chosen a less expensive school, well, then I’d be out less money and have more for my own retirement, etc.
One of my kids did become an RA, and we did “gift” that kid the amount saved on room & board - mostly because my H was an RA and his parents did the same for him, so we kind of carried that on. But I don’t know that I’d “gift” a free ride back to the kid.
One thing to complicate matters is depending on specific fields, there may be a different set of “elite” colleges than the usual Ivy suspects.
In engineering/CS, Berkeley, Caltech, CMU, MIT, Caltech, and Stanford are the tippy-top among elite schools followed by some Ivies like Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton…but they’re also sharing elite space with GTech, UMich, UW-Seattle, UIUC, etc while the rest of the Ivies are regarded as a tier or few down.
In short, if one had a choice to attend Berkeley or MIT and Harvard and Yale* and is an aspiring engineering major with serious desire for an engineering/CS career, a lot of engineering/CS folks…especially employers will find a student choosing Harvard or Yale to be puzzling considering they aren’t considered in the same league as the former two schools or several state flagships in the elite tier of engineering/CS schools.
- One HS classmate had such a choice and regretted choosing Harvard over the former two schools considering the lack of institutional support the engineering school received when she attended in the mid-late '90s. This was made more apparent when she ended up going to one of the tippy-top elite engineering schools for grad school and found a stark difference in resources available and institutional support.
re #225: "Has working in investment banking changed to become the stressful unhealthy situation described in http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204062704577223623824944472 ? "
From what I understand, no.
That article focuses on new “analyst” hires though. It gets better as you progress, for most people. Because you are no longer the analysts or associates, you are the person driving the analysts and associates. But it is never good. In many cases travel replaces hours at the office. Which are themselves still long. The travel is actually fun, IMO. But it is time away from your family.
271 above was well expressed:
“But, as good as we feel about having provided educational opportunities for these offspring, it came with a price.”
There is no free lunch,.I expect many “top jobs”, by some people’s reckoning at least, come at a price. Certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, yet people are still lining up to do them. Doesn’t mean you or I should want to do them necessarily. Not everyone wants a “top job”.
Reminds me of a comedy routine I watched around when Obama was elected president, something like " Wouldn’t you know it, they have the worst job in the entire world, so of course, go give it to the black guy…"
I don’t understand it myself, but for some reason all these people want to be president. I think many people would consider it a “top job”. Not for me though.