To be fair, @dfbdfb, I believe @Hunt is comparing only research universities.
My response would be that I agree if costs are not part of the equation (that is, for the really wealthy or the poor).
Costs being part of the equation makes it much trickier, however, and it almost becomes a risk-reward tradeoff if you have a kid who is undecided on everything. For instance, $250K for Harvard vs. $50K at OSU for a family who can afford Harvard but for whom $250K would still be a big chunk out of earnings and savings. Harvard offers better probabilities in to fields that many people desire. OSU offers a ton of different fields of study (many not offerred by Harvard). You definitely will have to pay out $200K more. The outcome may be better.
Well, sure, if the student is able to know that. I’m just saying that my observation is that many students don’t really know what they will be interested in (in part because many courses of study available in college are not taught in high school), and because many of them who think they know what they are interested in will become interested in something else. Certainly there are students who know what they want, and they know that XYZ University has it and Princeton doesn’t. More power to them. But I think such students are not as numerous as people might think, even among highly able and accomplished students. (Indeed, it’s been my observation that some of the most able students were essentially really good at everything in high school, and thus didn’t have a clear idea of what their real strengths and interests really were.)
Not sure that’s true for even everyone in the 1% who are viable candidates for those jobs. Especially after they learn about the working requirements/conditions of such jobs such as routinely working 80+ hour or more workweeks, expectations of being on-call 24/7 through their “crackberries”, being in a high stress high tempo environment, dealing with consequences of that stress from supervisors/clients who may lose their tempers* and/or sometimes even throw heavy objects at junior employees**, etc.
Saw this on a regular basis at a financial company and biglaw firm I worked at. High stress environments combined with the power of being a senior partner/executive or supervisor can bring out the worst in people...especially when directed at more junior employees/staff.
** Happened at a biglaw firm a friend worked at when a senior partner tossed a heavy law book at a paralegal on a friend’s team for being a messenger of bad news. It ended up being quietly settled so the paralegal got a great reference and a decent settlement while the senior partner was let off with a slap on the wrist punishment of attending some anger management workshops.
I think you should go to Ohio State, because since you don’t really know what you want, you should really maximize the options for fields of study. Also, people who go to LACs like Williams usually know that what they want is a certain kind of liberal arts education, and you don’t know that.
or
Since you have the academic ability to succeed at Williams (since they accepted you), I recommend you go there, because you will be surrounded by top-notch students who will encourage your learning as well as small classes in which you can engage directly with professors, something that may be helpful for you since you are uncertain about what you want to do. More hands-on guidance may be better for you than a more impersonal atmosphere like Ohio State.
Which is better?
Actually, I had no clue what I was getting into. And I was wrong about what I’d study, what I’d do afterwards, where I’d want to live, and lots more.
@ purpletitan-
“@musicprnt, actually state schools (the top ones, anyway) tend to have an even more preprofessional student body than the private elites.”
We are talking elite institutions of all sorts, one of the things that has happened is that the top public schools today are often as Elite as an ivy or similar schools…take a look at business schools, for example, and many of the top ones are public, like Northwestern and U Mich…elite schools are elite schools, public or private.
“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.”
That isn’t true, that is a statement of belief that is not backed up by facts. Despite all the economic changes, in China the top jobs are either in government, or jobs with close ties to the government, and if you don’t come out of one of the elite colleges in China, you won’t get hired into them. There was an article in the NY Times not long ago talking about college graduates in China, and what it talked about is that college graduates in China who don’t go to the few elite schools often end up with jobs that pay less than manufacturing jobs. It is also why students from China are represented in the admissions to elite schools in the US, especially the Ivies, because prestige schools outside China count as well. Korea and Japan are much the same (in Japan it is interesting, their elite universities are public, the privates are for the ‘losers’ who can’t get into the public ones).
Nope. No confusion here. There are actually lots of qualified students who don’t want that kind of job. Based on a recent conversation with several L2’s at an elite law school, there were many who were looking beyond big law for their first jobs (and this included kids who had already been pretty much guaranteed offers based on summer internships).
Not everyone wants the same thing out of life. In fact, from what I’ve seen, those generous salaries are likely to be less central to the decision for students who are already from families where finances are comfortable. The accomplishments of earlier generations allow the current students to think beyond starting salary as the measure of success.
@LaxMum
Absolutes are rarely true. I have a son who is a very top student. He is incredibly gifted and he has the accomplishments to match. I will not be the slightest bit surprised if one day he decides to walk away from his current path to pursue the priesthood. To sum up internal motivation to elitism, money, prestige or whatever other name you want misses the mark. Human beings are complex and desires and motivations are not easily quantified as absolutes.
@musicprnt, how much do you know about China besides what you read in the WSJ? Actually, blood matters than school there.
BTW, Northwestern isn’t public.
@LaxMum, you realize that Parchment is self-reported and thus not scientific, don’t you? And I certainly would expect the private elites to win more if money isn’t an issue (the really wealthy or poor/lower-middle-class). Furthermore, those kids who can get in to Princeton may not even apply there if their family circumstances don’t make Princeton financially feasible (that was true for a cousin who went to a state school and then got a grad degree from Harvard and in to Harvard, JHU, and UCSF for med school).
UT Austin is an example of how selectivity can be greatly different for different buckets of applicants. Texas high school students with top 7% rank meeting the curriculum requirements will have UT Austin as an automatic admission safety. But all others will likely find it more selective than one may think based on overall admission rate.
Why wouldn’t an Ohio resident student applying to super-selective LACs use tOSU and other in-state publics as safety or low match schools? Small schools may be less suitable than big schools for safeties.
@LaxMum The discussion I was referring to was with students from a T14 law school, most of whom were selected for Law Review as 1Ls. Very capable young people. Not everyone has the narrow vision of success suggested in your posts. Not that there aren’t people from their class who will be happy to accept an offer from Sidley Austin, but there are many who measure success differently.
I think this is a not incidental point and something that people who have no experience with higher education (like me) would miss if someone didn’t tell them, and it is one of the things I wish would be spelled out clearly for first-generation college applicants, regardless of family finances. My D2 applied to the top program in her specific field, not an elite school, but specifically what she wanted to do. When she was a sophomore (not knowing any better), she was allowed to take an upper level class and went to the office hours of the professor who, unbeknownst to her, was the foremost authority in his field in the world, to express her excitement at getting to learn from “someone who loves the same things I do??”" as only a 19 year old can do. This distinguished gentleman with the kindest heart saw something in her and has spent the three years since (including a whole year after she graduated) mentoring and supporting her and providing opportunities and introductions that are unparalleled in the field. He has made it clear to anyone who can help her that helping her is helping him. Those goodies matter and it’s not obnoxious to say so, it’s truth telling, and not everyone already knows it, and if they are more abundant at elite schools, then that should be brought into the equation when making a choice.
Or financial safety. What percentage of top students end up at their fiancial safety? 18 yr olds, unless independently wealthy, are limited in their options.
Yet…you went there Hunt. You did not need a clue as far as what you were getting into. You went there.
Our worlds are very small. Look out the window…you will see very little. There are billions of people who don’t know you, don’t know how or what you are doing and don’t care. Billions of people don’t care about me either.
People should just do what they want. Live their own lives.
If you don’t get your self esteem from within, you are screwed.
I have spent most of my life in the world of that <1%, and I can tell you with absolute conviction that wanting to work for a “bulge bracket” investment bank, one of the top three consulting firms, or Sidley Austin (or Cravath, Wachtel Lipton, wherever) is a minority position within the eligible group. If you are in that group, you don’t doubt your ability to support yourself, and your ambitions go beyond getting paid a lot. Of course, you care about paying off your debt, and you may very well want to accumulate prestige, but you will be considering different ways of doing that.
Also, you are wrong on your percentages in a critical way. It may be true that 99% of all law students anywhere would jump at a $160K offer from Sidley Austin, but it’s not true that only 5 students at Harvard or 1 at Yale or Stanford are eligible for such an offer. (That’s what <1% would mean at those schools.) Sidley might make an offer to dozens of students at those law schools.
They would appreciate the offer, but would be thinking about whether they would rather have a federal appellate clerkship, or maybe work at Justice, with the SG, or in a U.S. Attorney’s office, or with a good Juvenile Justice program, or work for a bulge-bracket investment bank, and maybe they want to be academics . . . Or, in one pretty famous case of a law student who got an offer from Sidley Austin, work as a community organizer. Even if they want to work for a big firm representing big businesses, there are a dozen firms with brands that are just as powerful, and that are largely indistinguishable to law students. All of them, Sidley included, face a lot of competition for top law students. They make lots of offers that are rejected in order to get a few good quality hires in the door.
If you looked at the top ten students by grades in my law school class (Stanford), only one went to a big firm right out of law school, and he went to St. Louis, where he wanted to live, not New York, Chicago, LA, or even San Francisco. One went to a growing boutique firm in LA, and one to a labor firm in Oakland. One took a teaching job at an Ivy League law school. The rest did judicial clerkships. After the clerkships, three went to big money-center firms, but only one of those spent his career at that type of firm. The biggest star in the class never worked for a firm at all – he spent years in an important U.S. Attorney’s office, and then took a law school job. The most economically successful people in my class were well outside the top 5% . . . including a partner at Sidley.
Why do we beat ourselves up with these weekly prestige threads? I often wondered if these questions were being posted by CC employees to drive traffic to the site.
@ purpletitan-
“how much do you know about China besides what you read in the WSJ? Actually, blood matters than school there.”
More than a bit. Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have had articles about China and its education system, and every article has said point blank that in China, if you don’t go to an elite college, you are locked out of most of the good paying jobs, and thus there is still the mad rush to get into those schools. Not only that, but I work in a company with a lot of people from overseas, my group has several Chinese ex pats who have family there, go back there, and they say the same thing, that China has not changed in that regards. There was another article today talking about the influx of foreign students into US universities, and the biggest group among them are kids from China, and they specifically mention they didn’t get into the elite schools and figured a western college was a better choice then staying in China. One of the things that is coming out of all the hype about the new China, is that as they say, what is old is new…the crony capitalism based around government ties (big surprise, the well off people in China are almost all closely tied to the government), the emphasis on elite universities and career tracks and so forth, has not changed all that much, nor has China’s place in the world economy for that matter, it is still primarily based on low cost production with some exceptions.
And yes, you are right about Northwestern, but I’ll substitute, U of Virginia’s business school is one of the top ones, and I believe Berkeley is top 20.
