Me too. And that includes not wanting to attend a top school to gain a job at any of the employers some folks view as being at the “top” of their game.
@thumper1, that’s absolutely fine. Not everyone wants to attend a specific school or work at a specific employer. That’s fine.
There are just too many different types of people in different types of situations. There is a college that is a fit for the vast majority of students that want to attend one.
Calling a school elite gives it a certain status that misses the the point of what they really are. There are schools that are highly exclusive. They exclude 95% of students. 95% of the population can’t get into one of these schools. That doesn’t make the people better, more deserving or more righteous people. Just exclusive…maybe they were elite when they excluded people based on race, gender, income class, pedigree and upbringing. Now they are just exclusive based on academic scholarship performance.
Some people care about elite colleges or GS/Google or Davos/NYC, while others don’t give a damn. Why do we need to convince each other?
Let those who do try their best to get into HYPSM, pay $250K, and then slave 100 hours/week for GS, and let those who don’t enjoy full-ride at Alabama, do marketing for Coca-Cola, go clubbing everyday in Atalanta.
Each does what is best in their own mind. Case closed.
I am not sure why there is such a fascination with GS or Bain. I continue to think that @Pizzagirl comments are directly on point. In the area I liive in if you told someone that your child got a job with Bain they would offer their sympathies. Bain is seen as a company that ships US jobs overseas. The best known and most admired lawyers in my area are not the clerks for an appellate judge but the ones that get large verdicts against big companies. Most of those lawyers went to no name law schools!! Life is what you make it and the people you surround yourself with.
It seems that the only fields one is allowed to gawk at on CC is engineering and medicine (I guess all of STEM, although folks here don’t seem to impressed with math as a career). Especially if it involves doing “research” (however defined, and at whatever level).
There are doctors who are fine, noble people and those who are in it for the money. There are engineers who are creative and have groundbreaking ideas and can bring those ideas to fruition, and those who picked it because they wanted a decent 9-6 job without having to ask themselves “why am I here and what is the meaning of life”.
You can’t demonize folks who have corporate careers. Like there aren’t venal people in every profession.
I will also point out that the talent market is fluid. My company subscribes to a service which conducts a study every year at a hundred or so college campuses in the country which is considered a reliable/authoritative source for information about how college students think about certain careers, companies, societal influencers, etc. It is fascinating to watch how quickly attitudes change among college kids (much more so than the rankings for the Forbes, Fortune, etc.) based on what’s going on around them.
In 2000 everyone wanted to work at an ecommerce startup. In 2002 nobody wanted to work at an ecommerce startup (the tech bust was in 2001). In 2007, everyone wanted to work in finance, preferably a hedge fund, but also derivatives and i-banking. By the time Lehman and Bear Stearns died, nobody wanted to work in finance. Teach for America, Clinton Global Initiative, Gates, and some other big non-profit/NGO’s picked up a lot of talent that would have gone elsewhere had the economy been different-- and of course, a lot of kids ended up working a cash register or going to a random grad program waiting for the market to turn around.
I point this out because it is important to note that even among the most pre-professional kids on the planet, the things that separate someone going off to work for something folks here would consider noble and good, vs. something immoral and venal, usually has NOTHING to do with the actual kid, and is much more about where that kid can actually get a job. Two kids- one has the “stats” to choose either high salary jobs to start, or working at Habitat for Humanity for $20K per year as an organizer/community relations associate. That kid has a choice. The second kid can’t get hired for one of the highly paid type jobs- and maybe that kid doesn’t care. It’s highly likely that kid doesn’t care. He/she wants to work at a non-profit, and plans to live at home and start paying off his/her loans, and 20K allows him to do that.
This is fantastic. But you can’t pretend that the kid had an actual choice (at the point of graduating). There are several inflection points along the way- where to go to college is just one of them-- which puts someone off the track for a more lucrative job. If someone hasn’t taken a math class since HS trig, they aren’t getting a job at a pharma company (entry level) pricing new cancer drugs. If someone has never taken a foreign language and/or doesn’t know how to program, they aren’t getting hired by the NSA. If someone never took macro, they aren’t getting hired to hedge the price of fuel at a major airline.
But carry on. All the smart kids go to med school. Everyone knows that.
Blossom, huh?
The rest of your post was interesting.
@florida26, multiple posters have pointed out why GS and Bain are appealing to many.
Not everyone is obligated to admire them or want to work at them. That’s totally fine.
@dstark I think Blossom was saying that tongue in cheek.
There are so many straw men present on this thread, it looks like No Crow’s Land.
Who is? I think a lot of people are saying that you can have a corporate career and do quite well without the “elite” college pedigree. Too many of us have personal stories and only have to look around us to see that this is true, particularly outside of the east coast or couple of other cities where apparently this is so important.
Here we go again with “everyone” and “nobody.”
Of course not. How is this relevant to the thread? The question is could a student take all of those classes relevant to those professions (and do well) at the state flagship and get such a job, or are those doors “closed” because achievements weren’t made at Yale? Isn’t that the premise of the OP? If you “skip the elite school, doors are closed” is the title of the thread, right? It’s not called “can you skip math classes and still get a job at a pharma company pricing new cancer drugs”, right?
@dstark I’m guessing Blossom was saying that last line tongue in cheek.
@Nrdsb4, Pizzagirl is, to answer your “Who is?” question.
Hmmm… I can’t read the last couple of posts in this thread for some reason.
I got the idea that blossom was being sarcastic.
I like blossom’s posts. She is bright. She works in hr. She has knowledge and experience. If she sees that access to certain careers are better if you go to certain schools, I am sure that’s true.
I worked in the financial industry. I don’t like the elite talk. I wasn’t doing god’s work.
My son was thinking of becoming a doctor. He chose the financial field.
I was kind of hoping my son was going to choose medicine. (I hope he is not reading this). 
Then again, the field of medicine going forward might stink.
I am impressed with math majors. I am
Impressed with people that can do things I can’t do. I might be more impressed with the financial field if I never worked in the financial field.
Thats kinda funny that you think that, HappyAlumnus, since if that were so, PG would be “demonizing” her own corporate career. Doubt that is the case.
There are so many straw men present on this thread, it looks like No Crow’s Land.
@jym626, PG engaged in a multi-page diatribe against the entire financial sector.
She isn’t in the financial sector, but she is in corporate America. Despite what some seem to think here, Corporate America has other areas besides finance/banking.
"Someone made the comment, “sure, someone can make a lot of money in Houston, but then they would have to live in Houston.” "
That was me.
“Besides the fact that that sentiment is more of the same snotty, better than thou nonsense people are objecting to,.”
That wasn’t besides the fact. That was the whole point. It was intended to be humorous. A caricature of an east coast elite sensibility. My Atlas reference was in the same vein; if you Google it you will hopefully understand. For anyone else who didn’t.
“we aren’t suggesting that someone raised in Boston move to Houston in order to make money.”
What about Connecticut to Houston (eg Bush)? Seriously, Houston is the heart of the oil & gas industry and to be “someone” in that field often requires at least a stint there. Lots of people move to Houston from elsewhere for that reason.
In fact firms located there that I am (or was) familiar with recruit(ed) at certain “top schools” in various fields of interest for talent, beyond just the schools in Texas and Oklahoma. Unfortunately the one I was most personally familiar with, of that type, was: Enron.
I guess you don’t have to be a Wall Street firm,or located in New York, to be considered a pariah.
But I agree that there is more than one way to make a lot of money. And more than one set of jobs, in one location, that would be considered “elite”, in some circle or another. I do however suspect that, in a number of such cases, access to recruiting for top jobs at these places may also be restrictive in some fashion, analogously to the situation in New York.
I wasn’t kidding though about my perception of the relative desirability of engineers living and working offshore for months on an oil rig,etc. But feel free to chime in about how I am “delusional” (please make sure to attack me personally, that seems to be “the thing to do” here these days) ,and tons of people would actually prefer living on the oil rig.
To address the original point of this thread, though by no means exclusive feeders, elite schools do serve as feeder schools to certain careers, in particular law, management consulting and investment banking. But beware, these careers sound more glamorous than they really are. All 3 require long, hard hours and in the case of MC, lots of traveling for at least 10 years before they make partner. Since the structure is move Up or Out, attrition rate is extremely high along the way. Very few make it to partner level. Those who leave before they make partner often have to take a substantial pay cut when they go into industries, assuming they can even get a job. Many MCs have a difficult time getting a job outside of MC because they are generalists who lack actual technical skills to do any specific job.
Although lawyers do need to know their laws, MCs and IBs are mostly generalists with no specific skills. No self-respecting CS grad will ever go into IT management consulting. As such, most IT consultants are libart grads whose only knowledge of CS is through a few company sponsored crash courses in “How the internet works” – so they know the lingo. For the most part consultants are good bull-shitters whose audience are typically CEOs who know even less about computers than they do. At the associate level they are taught how to put together sleek PowerPoint presentations peppered with buzz words such as “Strategic alignment”, “Streamline Operations”, “Synergy”, “Win-win” etc. At the manager/senior manager level they are encouraged to entertain clients by taking them out to ball games, for drinks, commercial clubs, or playing golf, just so they can sell them projects that produce little to no real value to their companies.
IBs are another group of leeches. They are good at only one thing and that is selling. They wine and dine then sell expensive services such as IPO or Mergers/Acquisitions to CEOs and techies who know even less about finance than they do. This is why valuation of companies are so out of whack, especially in IT. The bigger of a valuation they can talk up, the bigger their commission. Just look at Microsoft’s $6.3B write-off of aQuantus. Steve Balmer the CEO with the big ego with little knowledge of finance got suckered into paying a fortune for aQuantus by the IBs and MCs who touted “synergy”, and end up losing billions for Microsoft. And guess where Balmer went to school? He was no doubt talked into the stupid acquisition by some of his fellow Harvard alum in IB and MC. While his chums at the IB and MC made good commissions off the deal, Balmer is left to look like a fool and lost his job.
In short, if you are a generalist who is good at bullshitting and sucking up to people, want to make good money and do not mind producing no value whatsoever to society, by all means go to your elite school then go into MC or IB. But if you actually want to contribute to society in a meaningful way, steer clear of those careers! And in the end, even after you slave away for 10 years sucking up to everybody and his mother to make partner, most partners at top MC and IB firms still do not make as much as even employee No. 10,000 at Google or Microsoft!
So, there’s your option. Go to an elite school, major in libart and go work in “glamorous” IB or MC, or go get a real degree in CS/Engineering/Business from a state U and go work in IT. I have worked for a Fortune 25 firm, a top MC firm and a top IT firm, and I can tell you that there is no comparison, the IT firm is hands down the best place to work! You work your own hours, don’t have to suck up to anyone just have to be good at what you do, no traveling unless it’s for fun, wear t-shirts, shorts and sandals to work, get paid very well esp. with stock options, and are surrounded by people who are actually good at what they do and care about making a difference, rather than just bull-shitters good at sucking up and producing no value to society. It’s easy to lose your soul in MC and IB!