Skip an elite school, and doors will close

Parents Forum
501

Yes and elite college brand has an impact to many hiring managers. However, it is really the combination of college and major that is important, with major being primary and elite college brand being secondary. From an economic perspective, for those of us who are not born to wealthy families, and you will have given your child a much better chance to succeed financially.

There is no question that the going to a school that is higher on the ratings continuum and picking a more useful major will both open more doors for you. If you choose a full ride to top 200 school like Ball State University (for example) and major in PE over a top 10 college like Penn with an engineering or business degree, on average, the jobs available to you at graduation will not be as high paying and there will be many jobs that will not be available to you.

That does not mean that you will not have a great career or be happy, and there are many cases where the BSU PE major will do better financially, but not on average. However, there is a lot more to life than financial well-being.

Futhermore, there is a real continuum of colleges, and a real continuum of majors, and it is important that a student feels at home and comfortable with the school and major they choose.

It is also clear that the impact of selecting a good major and college on the rest of your life, is greater for families in the middle and low end of the income spectrum. If the student choosing a Ball State PE major over Penn Engineering is one of Donald Trump’s sons, then I think the opportunity cost of choosing the easier path is a lot less. The wealthy can overcome this a lot more easily than a poor, first generation, URM.

Additionally, a significant part of being able to monetize the elite college brand is really related to opportunities you can access and take advantage of. For example, it is not just that the Penn engineering student is attending Penn, but also that they are much more likely to have had to opportunity to construct a more impressive resume. They may have been able to spend a summer at MIT, or work as a research assistant to a Wharton or Engineering professor and have their name on a couple of published research papers, or obtain an internship with a company whose name is widely recognizable, and have more connections to people in positions of power. Bit by bit, they are changing something abstract (college brand) into real knowledge and experiences that they can more specifically quantified and explained and create real advantages when competing for jobs.

502

Such stats mean little unless you consider the portion of highly qualified applicants from “elite” and “non-elite” colleges. For example, in the United States, more than 80% of PhD students in computer science are male. When I was at Stanford, 96% of PhD students in computer science were male. This does not mean being female closes doors for being accepted to CS PhD programs at Stanford or other “elite” colleges. Instead it suggests that the vast majority of highly qualified applicants were male.

503

re #495:
“Well, the Midwest might not be “immune,” but most other locations besides the 2 coasts are not possessed of the mania”

Again, I don’t think it’s because employers in these other regions are so much more democratic, necessarily.
They have a mandate to focus locally/regionally due to cost, yield and retention concerns. Perhaps they also know they are not paying top dollar either, or , in some cases, not doing sexy “cutting-edge” work. And the local universities are not so stratified by ability levels as they are in the northeast. So there are fewer “elite” local schools they can target.

They are probably very practiced at sorting the wheat from the chaff at those local universities. They seemed to be at the place in the midwest I was referring to before.

But for those certain jobs they still want the wheat. It just has to be the wheat they have the best chance of actually harvesting there.

504

@mom2and‌

I am not sure how many of us in academe actually follow ranking lists, and the most useful, in my view anyway, NRC S- and R- rankings only give “ranges” rather than precise “ranks”. That being said, in my previous post, I had considered most of the USNEWS! top 50 Us and top 30 LACs as “elite”.

505

“A school like Case or RPI would not be considered “elite” but could send some very good STEM majors into PhD programs”

I frankly don’t know what’s been going on with RPI in the years since I paid attention to engineering schools,
But, based on my prior vantage point, Iit seems like it must be one of those places that US News rankings just don’t get.
It was historically one of the very top engineering schools in the Northeast.My midwest engineering employer only visited a few schools out of region, but RPI was one of them. I think many practicing engineers would include it in a short list of great engineering schools. At least they would have, back in the day. To my way of thinking, in that field, it actually IS “elite”. Or was, anyway.

506

We are upper middle class and my D is full pay at an Ivy, I would consider renting a house for a week expensive.

507

Yep, a case could definitely be made for Case and RPI (and Rose-Hulman and Rochester) being elite, at least in certain circles/areas.

Which is a reason why going off USN rankings is a poor idea.

508

@PurpleTitan "Yep, a case could definitely be made for Case and RPI (and Rose-Hulman and Rochester) being elite, at least in certain circles/areas.

Which is a reason why going off USN rankings is a poor idea."

Those school are ranked pretty well in US News. I am really not clear how elite is defined. I think these schools are good examples of why I think it is a good idea to view schools on a continuum, rather than Elite or Not Elite. They are all excellent schools with strong reputations.

509

That impact can be quite small as well. The survey of hundreds of hiring managers at http://chronicle.com/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf found that college reputation was the least influential of all surveyed factors in resume evaluations of new grads. College major was ranked highest among the academic factors, but notably less influential than experience factors.

510

Not everyone’s perception of reputation follows USNews, though.

511

Yep, a continuum, but @Pizzagirl puts it best. Especially when you focus on specific circumstances, reputation/prestige, opportunities, and education may not follow USN rankings.

512

@Data10 “That impact can be quite small as well. The survey of hundreds of hiring managers at http://chronicle.com/items/biz/pdf/Employers Survey.pdf found that college reputation was the least influential of all surveyed factors in resume evaluations of new grads. College major was ranked highest among the academic factors, but notably less influential than experience factors.”

The difficulty I have with this survey is that it assumes that the items in the survey are independent of the choice of college. In reality, students at top schools have more opportunities to obtain valuable experiences. I agree that the school name, in and of itself is not nearly as important as experiences, but the students attending top colleges just have more opportunities to gain internships and experience and strengthen their resume. It may be a students internship at Goldman Sachs, or Bain Capital, or McKinsey that an employer found impressive and not the name of their college they attended, however the facts are that the students that get those types of opportunities are disproportionately from top colleges.

“Not everyone’s perception of reputation follows USNews, though.”

I am not suggesting that US News is the be all and end all. My opinions about various colleges are generally somewhat similar to US News, but in certain cases, I have a significantly different opinion. I am sure that everyone has a slightly different perspective on it.

513

Hmm…future high level politician???

514

“It may be a students internship at Goldman Sachs, or Bain Capital, or McKinsey that an employer found impressive and not the name of their college they attended”

Sigh. Only in those fields! Do you think the hiring manager for a media company job cares in the least about GS? What IS this assumption that banking defines business?

515

For the hiring managers:

When most resumes they get come from the 99% of schools that are not elite, sure, a particular school’s reputation wouldn’t really matter for hiring managers.

However, as a CEO who I sat next to on a plane recently said, “If a resume has the name Cornell on it, it just jumps off the table!”

Basically, even if school reputation doesn’t matter that much in general, a fancy name on a resume will attract interest.

Also, jobs at Goldman, Bain, McKinsey are incredibly hard to get, even from elite schools; those firms take only the best and the brightest.

516

There are plenty of colleges that emphasize internships, co-ops, and provide students great opportunities and support for such activities, yet are often not what most consider “top colleges” on this forum. For example, a few months ago USNWR tried to rank the top colleges based on opportunities for internships, co-ops, and similar. Their list was Belmont, Berea, Butler, Cornell, Drexel, Elon, GeorgiaTech, Northeastern, Purdue, RIT, University of Cincinnati, USC, and Wagner. Many of their programs provide unique opportunities that are not as easily found at HYPSM…

517

Oh good lord. Yes we KNOW that GS/McK jobs are hard to get and recruit exclusively from elite schools and take only the best and brightest.

What you’re not hearing is that they aren’t the only places the “best and brightest” are interested in - so even if not going to one of a handful of schools closes the door to those particular handful of companies, it’s just not all that important. Plenty of best and brightest are interested in other things and those companies are not the be all and end all for everyone. Just because they loom large to your legend (obscure Beatles reference) doesn’t mean they are the dream job for everyone.

518

"However, as a CEO who I sat next to on a plane recently said, “If a resume has the name Cornell on it, it just jumps off the table!”

Of course you’re aware how regional reputation is.

519

Maybe if the Goldman folks had diversified their hiring intake and mindset a bit, they wouldn’t have needed an emergency $5 billion from a University of Nebraska grad to avoid a federal bailout.

520

@Pizzagirl, regional reputation? The plane I was on was between two cities in the South, and the CEO was based in rural Virginia. (That’s not exactly Cornell’s home region.) Even when I was growing up, far, far away from Ivy League-land, I knew about at least some of those schools.

Companies such as Goldman Sachs, Bain, McKinsey (and Google, Facebook, etc.) are certainly stronger lures for “the best and the brightest” than a mid-market company in Iowa or whatever non-“elite” company you admire. If you have 100 of “the best and the brightest” and give them the choice, sure, some of them will want the mid-market company in Iowa, surrounded by U. of Iowa grads, but a disproportionately large number will pick GS, Bain, McKinsey, etc.

@SomeOldGuy, Warren Buffet also went to the U. of Pennsylvania.