“Oh, you know the path,” a Princeton student recently told me at a recruiting event, “you go to an Ivy League school. Then you either become an investment banker or a management consultant. After two-three years, you apply to law school or b-school. And if you fall off the path for even one year, you can’t get back on.”
The best universities in the world are turning many graduates into krill for too-big-to-fail corporate leviathans. Since they’re well-paid krill, no one complains, but when more than a third of a graduating class disappears each year into the gaping maw of financial services, it begs the question whether Ivy League schools are teaching critical thinking after all.
If a majority out of the Ivy League is marching down the professional services path every year, then logic dictates they’re not creating new companies or helping young ones thrive.
If we expect each generation to be better off than the previous, we need more young firms bringing new products and services to the market. But unless the Ivy League stops running human resources for Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, the prospects are dim."
^^^ This.
Can anyone seriously dispute this? If Ivies are funneling 40% of undergrads exclusively into finance and law, for some students it seems elite schools actually CLOSE doors. If students are not genuinely encouraged to explore other professions and pathways, they may never see those possibilities.
“If we expect each generation to be better off than the previous, we need more young firms bringing new products and services to the market. But unless the Ivy League stops running human resources for Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, the prospects are dim.”
That’s what I don’t get. Why is it more “elite” to finance a company than to actually develop / market the goods and services that have value in the first place? And isn’t it the companies that HIRE McKinsey that are the elite ones - as they’ve got the $ to hire McK in the first place?
It’s kind of like saying it’s more elite to sell women’s dresses at Neiman-Marcus than to actually BE the person who buys dresses there in the first place.
Igloo, many successful people have never heard of Williams. Many people learn of Williams when they have high school kids. Some families with high school kids have never heard of Williams.
I don’t know when I learned about Williams. I definitely never heard of Swarthmore before I found CC. I don’t know anybody in real life who went to Swat. I know one person who went to Amherst.
I worked with a lot of people. People usually do not talk about which schools they went to unless they are into sports or telling old tales of misbehavior.
The neurosurgeon did not tell me where he went to school. I had to look it up.
Tons of families with high school kids hsve never heard of CC. Never heard of the US News Rankings. Many employers don’t know where schools are ranked and they have never heard of some schools.
I remember watching videos of college tours during my daughter’s find a school process. I used to work out and watch the tours. Drew, Hamilton, Hampshire, Oberln, Haverford, Penn and probably another 35 schools. No Williams video. Cost a lot of money watching the videos. I watched them working out so my weight was good.
One day I was watching a tour of Hamilton. I called my daughter over. After watching for two minutes, my daughter said she is not going there. I watched the rest of the video. Hey! I saved money and time. We didn’t visit Hamilton.
This has nothing to do with the quality of Williams. Nobody has ever applied from Williams to my friend’s program. My friend has heard of Williams now.
You might not think that, but in actuality there is only so much time in the day to do everything. When kids are pressured to get into very selective schools, they often cherry-pick activities which will benefit them in the long run (i.e. look good to schools or companies). Sports, EC’s, community service, clubs, these are all productive “look good on resume” things. There is a big difference between doing those activities, and just doing whatever sounds like fun. Obviously there is a balance that needs to be struck between the two types of activities, but the question is: are elite schools forcing kids to bias their activities too much to one side?
As has been discussed, the finance jobs are generally 2 year positions. In senior surveys, very few grads say they plan to stay in finance/consulting positions. Instead they plan to attend grad school or switch to different fields. Alumni surveys after being out of college for several years paint a different picture. For example, at most Ivy League colleges the most common job title among alumni on Payscale is “Software Engineer”. This includes Ivies that get few CS majors.
If this thread was titled “Skip an elite college and you may have a harder time making piles of money on Wall Street,” then there would be much less to talk about. Fine. Agreed. Who cares.
Williams grad does not necessarily equal high-quality grad student. Graduate of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople doesn’t necessarily equal poor-quality grad student.
Seriously, you apply to grad school (talking about research/academic programs, not the professions here), your writing sample and personal statement is going to be read very, very carefully. Your coursework is going to be looked at, but mostly in terms of the types of courses you took. The only way institutional reputation is going to be judged is indirectly—if we know the faculty you studied with and got letters from, we have some idea of their rigor. We know, though, that even though academia’s a small world (particularly in a small field like mine) we aren’t going to know everyone, so that isn’t a huge deal.
I went to Williams… I had never heard of it until I was a senior in high school, and I decided that I really wanted the liberal arts college experience. My parents had never heard of it, my grandparents had never heard of it, and my high school classmates had never heard of it. Some of my classmates at Williams hadn’t even heard of it. They thought confusedly that they were attending William and Mary.
Ultimately, I attended graduate school at an Ivy, where I can’t recall anyone not having heard of Williams. Almost all of my classmates attended top LACs, Ivies or Ivy peers, and many had considered Williams in their college search processes. Williams alums were way overrepresented in my program, so the few kids who might not have known about Williams prior to graduate school would likely have exposed to ephs before me.
Almost all of my classmates from Williams attended some sort of graduate/professional school. In fact, I can only think of one friend who did not (and he’s very successful, btw), though there must be others that I’m missing. That said, their enrollments were concentrated in a very narrow band of institutions and fields. I would imagine that there are more than a few public flagships and exceptional programs within these flagships that have never enrolled any Williams alums. Since Williams does not bill itself as a research intensive institution, research professors in some fields would probably not bump elbows with Williams profs. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if the majority of professors at research universities knew little to nothing about Williams. Would this disadvantage applicants coming from Williams? Maybe, but I doubt it. A little-known fact is that admission to the modal graduate programs for domestic students (very different story for internationals) isn’t all that tough, and in that respect, the college pedigree isn’t terribly important. Faculty sitting on admissions committees at the highly selective colleges, and the highly selective graduate programs within these colleges, are far more likely to have had exposure to Williams students. Again, there are going to be exceptions here, but I would hope that any sensible admissions coordinator/decision-maker who receives an application containing a compelling statement-of-purpose accompanied by a nice transcript and high standardized test scores would give that applicant a fair shake.
Right—but that doesn’t mean those reviewing grad-school applications think “Aha! USN&WR-rated #1 LAC in the country!” so much as they think “Aha! Another one from a LAC!”
(And FWIW, the reason I ever heard of Williams is because a pair of Williams students presented their research—a combination of their senior theses—at the big annual conference in my subfield one year, and it overlapped with a couple strands of research I was working on at the time. Otherwise? I’d probably still be thinking of it as just another small LAC in New England somewhere.)
Funny enough, at both of my PhD admission weekends, my roommates were both from Williams. Different graduation years and different fields but same school nonetheless.
