They can dream, ucb! And for all we know, they could be on a list. I recall a cc’r quietly acknowledging her DH was on the Forbes list-- and very high up!
BTW, as many self-made American billionaires graduated from state schools (11) as from the Ivy League (11):
http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/most-popular-among-billionaires-colleges?hootPostID=258c7ac123144828ef9562955bb89819
If you count the self-made billionaire drop-outs, public schools beat Ivy League 4 to 2:
http://factually.gizmodo.com/one-in-four-self-made-american-billionaires-dropped-out-1656784411
Let’s not forget that Oprah went to a state school. She had the double burden of being both Black and a woman on top of her burden of being at a lowly state school.
If she can do it, then by golly, ANYONE can do it!
And, BY GOSH, the two best human beings in the history of the world- George Washington and Ronald Reagan (rest their souls) went to no college and a lowly non-elite school (respectively). And they single-handedly made the greatest nation on earth!
I wonʻt comment definitively on the subject at hand, but depending on say, the elite professional school involved, it has far more reach and opportunity than one could ever imagine. A great example is YLS, which is basically an albino unicorn. I know personally that for a recent graduating class, of a little over 200 students, there were in total number, over 300 real jobs/firms/opportunities, competing for these students. I was quite amazed when I saw a sign-up for federal clerkship interviews, which in the legal world, are quite prestigious. At most schools, even top 20 law schools, there are a series of GPA/law review/writing sample requirements, to obtain just an interview…
Now, in many ways YLS is aberrational, as it also has the largest, per capita endowment, supporting a law school, over a billion, yes a billion, supporting a student body of less than 700 students. This is a critical point, because relative to the other top 10 law schools, YLS student receive either the greatest amount of actual FA (grants) and/or loan forgiveness, which translates to lower net debt, which then translates in folks actually taking jobs they want versus ones that have to take in order to pay back student loans. Long story sort, if you can manage some way to obtain admission to YLS versus your state law school, run very quickly to the admissions office and accept.
Take any program the highly pre-selects the applicants and you find the same results. So, the article is basically saying, the if you do not have an umbrella, then expect to be rained on. The fact is that if everybody at certain place have an umbrella, then everybody is protected from that rain, period. It is the preselection criteria (umbrella) that results in certain student body that makes the difference, not the program itself. Some Honors colleges at in-state publics that pre-select at the highest level can boost the same success statistics and they do. If you select top 200 out of whole applicant pool and in addition place them into very small classes, it is hard to imagine that they fail to achieve, although couple exceptions may occur but the low number of failures will not significantly affect statistics anyway.
I’m not convinced by the “research.” Wai does not have access to the test scores of the super-special billionaires/Davos people/mover and shakers in his studies. I don’t consider Forbes a reliable source for data. Or at least, not reliable enough.
He has access neither to test scores nor to net worth for these individuals. He’s using attendance at universities on his Magic List as a proxy for an estimate for test scores, even though selective universities practice holistic admission, and even though one cannot assume that billionaire’s children will be close to the institution’s reported averages.
Wai’s logic is rather circular. These selected people are successful=>some of them, or their children attended a small number of colleges=>those colleges have high test scores=>therefore, those colleges are the key to success=>therefore, you are DOOMED if you turn down one of those colleges. What?
In comparison to the US population as a whole, completing a 4 year college degree after high school anywhere puts you ahead of 80% of the population. An “average school” would put one even further ahead.
In order to judge the effect of the “elite” college sample, you would have to compare its influence on graduates’ lives, in comparison to other students with the same test scores and academic preparation, who turned down elite schools to attend other institutions. As elite schools practice holistic admissions, the personal qualities are an important factor.
If my D is admitted to an elite school, she will attend. Either way, she will work very hard wherever she is and will likely do fine. With D we visited some schools much lower on the totem pole than those we visited with her siblings. This is what I have concluded: on paper, the offerings of a state school compared to an elite school can look similar. There are the same clubs and sports, there are lectures and symposia, there are students who do research with professors, and there are career centers and companies who come to recruit. You have to dig deeper to see the distinctions, but they do in fact exist with regard to the quality of the student and the quality of the academic and extra-curricular programs. For example, elite school X brings in the world-renowned expert to give a lecture on subject A. The state school Y brings in the professor from the elite school who organized that lecture to discuss subject A. (Just noticed this phenomenon when I researched what lectures in D’s field were happening at her prospective schools.)
A friend whose husband is a professor at our flagship and whose one D works there (I state this so she know she has a connection and affection for the flagship) had two older children attend an Ivy, and the youngest the flagship. She confirms that superficially the opportunities look similar, but in reality her older kids had a superior experience. For example, the level of research her older two kids did was much higher than what her younger D got to do, despite the three girls having similar academic ability and preparation. The youngest D’s peers at the flagship honors program were not as motivated as the elite school kids (she thinks that might have been due to an eroding effect of the school party environment, rather than how they came in to the school). Also, whereas both schools may boast that a company like Target recruits there, they are hiring for corporate at the elite school whereas they are looking for local store managers at the state school. Obviously, your mileage will vary based on the region you live in and the specific schools in question. Cal Berkeley and UMich are not the sort of state schools I am referring to; they are elite IMO.
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Wei never said any of the things that are being attributed to him here, and argued against - that the state school grad is DOOMED, or cannot be or get a good husband, or isn’t fit to be a nurse, or is necessarily mean with his or her charitable endeavors.
@TheGFG, the question, though, is how well did they turn out afterwards.
I know a couple of guys who were heavy partiers in college. They both have what I consider to be above average interpersonal skills (which I don’t consider to be mere coincidence) and those skills have served them pretty well post-graduation.
^ Right, as if one needs to be a heavy partier to develop social skills; as if the hard-working elite school students have no social skills due to being nerds, and as if you can oh so easily be admitted to an elite school with few to no extracurricular activities, no evidence of leadership, and average or deficient personality assessments from your teachers and GC.
That said, I am of the opinion that for a kid to do as well at a regular state school as at an elite private, they’d have to fit a certain mode: namely, be someone who is self-motivated, driven, and unaffected by what other people do (because there are a lot of temptations at a big state school). Plus, the faculty and other students in their department (not just honors college) probably need to be of a certain caliber as well.
There are certain publics which take in over a hundred National Merit Scholars each year, yet when you look at any output metrics (the ones I looked at were matriculation at an elite professional school and science and engineering PhDs generated), they fall well short in absolute terms even compare to other big publics that don’t take in as many NMS (because they don’t offer scholarships to them).
So you still want to pick a good school/department, but if it’s a kid who is NMS/Ivy candidate-level and has the right attitude, you may find good options that are cheaper than full-pay.
BTW, @TheGFG, do you like to set up strawmen much?
I just noted something I observed. Then you let your imagination run wild and started lobbing volleys at a make-believe opponent.
For what it’s worth, one of the guys I referenced went to an Ivy-equivalent.
This stereotype is commonly made about STEM folks and above average or better academic achievers/geniuses who aren’t into the HS/college party scenes.
It’s also not necessarily true. One older cousin who majored in beer/partying double major at a big-10 in the '80s does have highly engaging social skills to a point. However, such skills only go so far if one has deficits in other areas…such as getting stuff done when it needs to be done or acting unprofessional because one doesn’t know “appropriate time and place”.
Also, social skills is something which can be picked up by most NT folks during or even after college. One older cousin and several HS classmates who were not party folks and were proud nerds of the STEM/academic type have picked up social skills which enabled them to be successful professionally and socially.
While social skills are necessarily, I am of the mind that they are seriously overemphasized among many American parents and students. Especially when they omit the fact social skills without the relevant academic/professional skills, ability to get stuff done on time, and knowing “appropriate time and place” means one tends to get the reputation around the firm of being “an empty suit” and if things don’t improve…end up getting terminated.
Sorry, PT, it may not have been the argument you were making, but it is certainly one I have heard countless times. Parents say things like “I wouldn’t even want my Susie Snowflake to go to Princeton. I want her to be happy and have a normal life.” “Well, maybe John got into Harvard, but so what? The kids that go there are all snotty and have no social skills.” or “My Jaden wouldn’t want to go to Penn. He doesn’t like the kind of kids who go there.” They set up the choice as “Strive for/go to an elite school and become socially stunted,” or “Go to a state school and be normal, happy, and with superior social skills which you will then use to surpass the nerdy HYP kid.”
I find that very interesting considering my impressions of Harvard and Princeton students and alums is that most have outstanding social skills. And from having visited the campus and taking a few courses at H, most students there were actually very down to earth and treated me well. Completely opposite of the snotty stereotype.
I find it especially interesting considering the stereotype of Princeton from its past admission policies of heavily emphasizing legacy, athletic, and sociability factors meant many alums from my time in HS and older meant it was regarded more as a finishing school for well-connected well-off boarding school highly social graduates than topflight academic achievers. This has changed once those admission policies were changed to admit more topflight academic achievers from public magnet HSs and public schools in general.
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Most of those referenced above were never made in response to Wei, nor attributed to him, but in response to other comments made on the thread.
D2 goes to an Ivy and I had a former appointment at the same school–overall, while a tad more articulate, from my vantage and having taught at a couple state universities, they were more or less similar to other undergraduates. I would say, that had a smidgen more snotty-factor, but all things being equal, nothing too overbearing.
These types of threads always morph into the following:
“What do you MEAN elite schools aren’t better than other schools? How can you say that going to elite schools doesn’t open doors?!” Etc., so on and so forth.
Rarely does anyone on these threads say that elite schools are not full of talented, accomplished individuals who will likely go on to become successful people or that attending one of these schools will not bring advantages to the graduate or open doors for them in their chosen professions.
What is more often disputed in these threads is the notion that students who either are not accepted to these schools or who for whatever reason choose not to attend or even to apply are “disadvantaged” or have “doors closed” to them. With some very few exceptions (profession-wise), this just isn’t the case, as most of us have observed either in our own lives or in lives of people around us. Successful people who attended state schools or other “non elites” are plentiful, they are not outliers or the one in 30,000 as someone suggested earlier. That’s just nonsense.
I tend to agree with you–I think the more cogent point, is that these “elite” schools do offer, at least initially, a profound amount of opportunities, via recruiters, alum, societal reputation (where true or not), etc… to their graduates. After that, well, its up to the individual…
First, if “doors will close” means making money, it is somewhat true, but most would do better to focus more on selection of your major than on which college you attend. College do a good job of hiding the high level of unemployment and underemployment among their graduates. Especially among liberal arts majors.
Second, while a top -branded college confers a benefit, in most cases, the student will do the best at a school where she/he get more involved. If the schools are ranked anywhere close to one another, the school where they will be an active member of the community will be best. Where will they join clubs, where will they apply or run for a board position in an organization, where will they want to be a research assistant, where do they fit in with the other students, where will the be able to develop the most socially, where do they think they will work harder on academics because the course offerings excite them more, where there are more internship opportunities, which has better career placement, and more research opportunities? All of those factors can mean a lot more to a students success than whether a school is a top brand, or whether the school is free.
The anecdotes about community college successes or Ivy League failures don’t really help. The fact is that we don’t know whether the community college success would be even more successful if they had gone to an Ivy. The Ivy league failure might have failed even worse if they had gone somewhere else. We will never know. We only know what improves your odds, but individual outcomes are very unpredictable.