Ironically, this just popped up on my home page:
http://fortune.com/2015/03/23/college-admissions-ivy-league/
Again, it doesn’t bash Harvard or say that going to an elite school won’t do anything good for you…just that it’s not a REQUIREMENT for success.
I don’t find most people saying that going to a super-elite school does not offer advantages. I also don’t find most people saying their kid would not go to Harvard if admitted. That sounds like sour grapes to me. There are some kids that may get into an elite that is not as generous with financial aid that has to turn down the elite. It is the comment that anything less as an undergraduate closes doors that is raising concerns here. Even kids at super-elites are not automatic admits to YLS or equivalent. Plus, there are kids that just miss the tippy top schools that have the ability but were in the 90%+ that were not admitted or could not pay. Those kids may do well at a school ranked just outside the elite and get into a top grad school.
For lawyers, business, etc going to a top GRAD school certainly opens doors. Supreme court clerkships are only going to the top students from the top law schools. And getting there is much easier from an elite. But it is not true that NOT going to an elite means all doors to megasuccess are closed. It may take more work and effort, but it can be done, even if only by unicorns.
@boolaHI, that is definitely true for M7 b-schools and T3 law schools vis-a-vis everyone else (less true but there’s still a large advantage from going to a top 15ish b-school or most T14 law schools).
At the undergrad and PhD level, different schools (and for PhDs, different faculty advisors) will confer a different amount of advantage, depending on the field. And in general, private schools can lavish more resources on its undergrads than public schools (though that varies across colleges, universities, and even schools within the same university).
All that plus cost has to be taken in to consideration.
Well stated Purple.
What is defined as a elite school?
When D1 was applying to grad schools and weighing her options, DH would say “Why did you so quickly eliminate School B from contention?” She answered that there were no advisors there who were experts in the subspecialty she wants to pursue. That school is a great school in general, perhaps with a better reputation than others on her list when one isn’t looking closely from an individual perspective like hers, but was completely off her list since it didn’t offer her a path to achieve her goals. My alma mater had a well known advisor in her chosen field she would have loved to work with, but he wasn’t accepting any new grad students in his lab that year, so there was no point in applying there. And so on. She ended up at her current school because it is considered tops in her specific area of study. It is considered one of the “elite publics” but is not an IVY or similarly ranked private. She turned down an offer at a couple of very “elite” institutions because they were not of the same caliber in her very specific area of concentration.
These are the schools, from my own understanding and certainly not definitive, that have elite associated to their institution:
Air Force Academy
Berkeley (University of California)
Brown University
Caltech
Columbia University
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
Duke University
Georgetown University
Harvard University
Johns Hopkins University
MIT
Naval Academy
Princeton University
Stanford University
University of Chicago
University of Pennsylvania
West Point
Yale University
D1 applied to two Ivies as an undergraduate and was part of the 90% that did not get an admission offer. She went on to a public Ivy and has been very successful. She graduates this year with highest honors and PBK. Her public Ivy degree opened the doors she wanted to walk through.
She has the choice of Columbia or Berkley with full funding for a PhD in her chosen field. She is choosing Berkley (another public Ivy) over Columbia because the resources were better for her area of concentration and Berkley offered more years of funding. She won’t make any of those lists that the OP mentioned or be appointed to SCOTUS, but she is satisfied with what she has achieved.
In the end, personal satisfaction trumps what others perceive as important.
I wish we could put the term “public Ivy” to rest and reserve Ivy for Ivy League schools. Those public schools are great on their own merit without having to categorized them as “Public Ivies”.
Yes, Ivy League and other elite schools have the highest concentration of top students based on the metrics of SAT, ACT, and class rankings, but other top students don’t just disappear. They go on to other schools and succeed if they apply themselves. Sometimes, those elite schools are not the best option.
For what my daughter wanted to major in and what she wanted to accomplish, there wasn’t a single Ivy League or elite school that could deliver it. Not even close. So, I couldn’t get her to apply to an elite school; she considered it a waste of money. I just wanted her to say she got in but she was right. If she graduates accomplishing her goal, she will have an exceptional resume and experience.
I can not be more thankful for the public universities that stepped up their game to attract students away from elite schools. The value they offer cannot be matched for those of us deemed too rich for financial aid but not willing to spend $260K.
The author formed his list according to SAT scores for purposes of his study. Periwinkle linked to the listing in an earlier post.
I’ve heard the term “public Ivy” used before, but usually more as a way to compare a certain public with other publics.
It seems to me that anecdotally, almost everyone looks back at the decision they made to go to school X or school Y and congratulates themselves on making the best decision.
The facts are that they really don’t know where the other path would have taken them and whether it would have been better or worse. I think that this is a natural confirmation bias. Few people will decide that they made a bad decision.
The problem with the original article is, it lumps together undergrad and graduate degrees from an elite school. The fiercest competitions to get into an elite school is at the undergraduate level. I would be far more impressed if the percentages are strictly for the elite undergrads, but we all know that is not the case. Most of these people went to non-elite colleges for their undergrad, then go on to elite schools for their graduate degree.
One day last summer when I was bored, I did an analysis of the 200 richest people in America on Forbes’ list of 400, and here’s what I found with respect to how many went to elite schools for their undergraduate degree:
Harvard: 11
U of P: 11 (incl. Donald Trump who transferred from Fordham)
Yale: 9
Cornell: 5
MIT: 5
Princeton: 4
Columbia: 4
Dartmouth: 3
Stanford: 1 (Charles Schwab)
Brown: 0
That’s 53 out of 200, ~25%. Sounds impressive until you consider that:
a) ~75% of the top 200 richest people in America did not go to an elite school for undergrad, including many self made billionaires in software such as Sergei Brin, Larry Page, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, Jan Khoum(whatsapp). Most of these 75% went to state schools for undergrad.
b) I did not do an analysis of how many of these people inherited their fortune rather than are self-made, but many have last names that sounded like they came from wealthy families to begin with, which diminishes the claim that you need to go to an elite school to become successful.
There are thousands of people who attended the colleges in JoanneB’s list who are not 1) billionaires, 2) working on Wall Street, nor 3) Surgeon General. Some of them may not have attended graduate school. Many apply to be teachers after graduation.
The answer to the question is that things like the Davos list or the Forbes list of most powerful men tend to be self selecting lists, where the people doing the selecting themselves are from elite backgrounds…and as far as the Davos list or the Forbes most powerful men list, is this necessarily the be all and end all of ‘the greatest’? These are so rarified, so out there, that very few people will make it,even if they went to an elite school.
So does going to an elite school matter? The answer is yes, but there is a strong caveat to that, and that is that going to an elite school has advantages, but so do other schools. Obviously, the name can help open doors on first jobs, the networking from Ivy league schools is not only legendary, but true, there is an old boys network there, and depending on who a student gets to know, it can open doors…but there are also a limited number of doors that only can be done via an Ivy degree or other elite school. Want to go work for Goldman Sachs or other top investment banks, you better come out of an elite school (and for the record, it isn’t because kids coming out of elite schools are necessarily going to make good bankers, it is that it is a self fulfilling prophecy, that those running the banks going back time immemorial came out of the Ivies and such, and that they self limit it. I have heard rumblings that the investment banks are starting to question that, that they are finding that many of the kids coming out of elite schools all study either economics and /or finance and all sound alike and think alike, and are looking for applicants from non traditional backgrounds, like kids who majored in music performance). White shoe law firms still want graduates from elite law schools (often Harvard or Yale), who in turn likely came from the elite schools, same is true of places like Harvard Med. Academia tends to have bias towards elite programs , though these days, where tenured professorships are drying up and teaching at the college level is becoming the province of wandering gypsy adjuncts and such, that is starting to die, too.
On the other hand, while an ivy or elite degree can get you an interview or a first job, it won’t have the weight in most jobs or fields beyond maybe getting the interview. In ‘regular’ jobs, including middle and upper level management, there often is a bias against Ivy league grads and there is some statistical evidence to back this up, that ivy league graduates may not be all they are cut up to be, and that they can have attitudes of entitlement and wanting to start ‘from the top’, that graduates of more modest programs may not have; it is basically a variation on the “Avis” syndrome, where the kid with the slightly less stellar grades and credentials can often turn out to do better than the A kid with the stellar stats, in part because they know they need to ‘try harder’ to impress those they hire, plus they may have more real world skill then the kids with the 4.0’s. I can tell you that 30+ years in on the tech side, as an employee and hiring manager, that Ivy league degree starts meaning less and less the longer you are working, and that for most jobs there may be some advantage having that school on your resume, because of networks and yes, name recognition on the part of some managers, but most managers out there are likely not to be elite school graduates, and to them what you have done will be more important than where you went to school, the reality is that the Ivies graduate a small percentage of all graduates, and while there is no doubt that among certain quarters of the elites the Ivy league may control and dominate access to it, for whatever reasons, but on a broad basis? Not really, not in most ‘real world’ jobs.
What interests me is how when discussions like this come up, how much people who have graduated from the elite schools have this need continually to show how going to those schools makes one elite. If in fact the Ivy and other elite schools bestow these incredible things on their graduates, that if you don’t graduate from there you will be forever mired in obscurity, never achieve much, why do some of the graduates spend all their time proclaiming how going to an elite school is the only way to be ‘great’? Heck, if going to an ivy bestowed greatness upon its graduates, last thing I would want to do is brag about it and have every tom, dick and harry trying to get in and breaching the walls of greatness, would want to keep it as its own little secret world lol.
I turned down an Ivy to attend a state U for financial reasons, got a degree in CS, and from there went on to work for a Fortune 25 company, travelled the world, then went to a Big 4 accounting/consulting firm, followed by a top software firm. I don’t think my career could’ve gone any better had I gone to the Ivy though I’ll never know. The only thing I know is no one ever asked me where I went to school after my first job (and I graduated with 6 job offers). They only cared what I did in my previous job and what I can bring to the new job.
What you get out of a college education equals what you put into it.
That said, I did have a STEM degree. I think for STEM, it matters much less where you went to college, as evidenced by the many successful software founders in Silicon Valley. In fact, over 90% of people I worked with in all 3 companies went to state schools, including most of those who made partners and VPs. I’ve also met many successful startup founders in my area who went to state schools.
For those who want a career on Wall Street, Capitol Hill or the Supreme Court, it probably matters more where you went to college. But then again, from the chart in the article, only 20% of House representatives went to elite undergrad/grad. John Boehner went to Xavier, Newt Gingrich went to Tulane, Paul Ryan went to Miami, Bob Corker-Univ. of Tennessee.
People who are truly talented do not need go to an elite school to make it. They can make it on their own wherever they go to college. College is just a means to an end, not an end itself. The book “The Millionaire Mind” shows with convincing statistics that majority of America’s deca-millionaires did not go to elite schools, many in fact didn’t even go to a flagship state U but went to unheralded second tier state schools.
The guy who founded my company, that is one of the biggest, most succesful firms on Wall Street, went to a state school for an engineering degree, went to a ‘mundane’ Cal State school for an MBA, and has created a company that is generally regarded as one of the best managed companies on Wall Street…go figure, not an Ivy cred to be found.
I agree totally about in most jobs, the school stops mattering once you are working and have experience. I had one idiot hiring manager after I had 10 years experience in a very hot area of tech, ask me what school I went to and what my GPA was, I walked out of that interview, and I told the headhunter that wanted me to interview there that someone like that is a first class idiot, who probably hires people based on college gpa and where they went to school and ends up with a department that isn’t known for doing much.
That is really bizarre. It could make total sense to ask a new grad those questions, because presumably that is their most recent body of work. But to ask those questions of someone with 10 years of experience rather than finding out what that potential employee brings to the table as a result of that experience makes zero sense.
If school and GPA were the most important factors in my career, I’d have it made (4.0 GPA at a public school known to produce good nurses). As it is, they usually ask annoying questions about what kind of technology I have experience with, which certifications I’ve gotten, past leadership positions, and assessment skills- and they want to talk to your former supervisors to verify what you’ve told them. It would be a lot easier to just turn in a resume with only two facts on it!
I guess the big thing to me is, where I’m from, you’re going to a state public school regardless of how smart you are here in rural west TN. A couple get into Vandy, one went to Purdue, but they usually have some of the few professional parents here. I went big,applied to yale princeton harvard and dartmouth, and have been accepted by William and Mary and Notre Dame so far. Other than 2 other seniors who also applied to Yale and have been accepted into Boston U, all the top kids either can’t get out of the “no way i can go there/afford it” mindset and go to UT (including my friend that has better scores than me in like every field) because it’s easy and close to home. Noone really breaks out. The thing that got me out of this was the fact that my parents are teachers, and know its possible, and I was blessed to tour some schools, and found that I love small schools, the support systems, and especially as a politics/business guy, the networking. I changed from UT overnight. I think the big thing to look at for ivies and other elites is retention and grad rates, and the support system they provide for students. Not only are you getting an education, but you have people there that care about your success because, basically, they’re investing in you. The atomsphere isn’t that you’re going at it on your own, but rather that they want you to succeed, surrounded by some of the most successful and brightest people in the world. Combine that with who you meet there and it describes the appeal and doors that these schools open.
@boolaHI
The “eliteness” of the FSAs has historically varied depending on the public perception of the military and the military officer career path in certain regions and time periods.
For instance, while they have been considered elite institutions for the last 2+ decades, I’ve heard from several older HS alums and even some FSA alums that it wasn’t considered elite or even popular back in the '70s and early-mid-'80s because of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Lots of students and even some parents were not eager for their kids…especially if they were viable elite college aspirants to go into the FSA and be obligated to serve 5 years as a military officer in an era when the military was still dealing with public perceptions from the Vietnam War syndrome.
This feeling was strong in the NYC area among topflight students and especially those attending private schools or public magnet HSs like the one I attended. Up until the mid-80s and sometimes even beyond, the FSAs weren’t popular choices among topflight students, especially those who were viable aspirants to elite universities, especially HYPSMCC.
Hence, the shock and in some cases, dismay over an older fellow HS alum who turned down full FA/ROTC scholarship to MIT to attend Annapolis in the mid-'80s because he wanted to be a submariner and Annapolis was the best way to guarantee that. Some of his classmates and even some parent friends thought he was “nuts” to turn down MIT for Annapolis then. If he had graduated when I graduated our HS a decade later, no one would have been puzzled or thought him “nuts” as FSAs were perceived as on par and sometimes more elite than the elite universities including HYPSMCC…a perception which has continued to the present.
There’s definitely an anti-Ivy bias in many corners of the hardcore engineering/CS world/companies, especially in my uncle’s* generation(late '50s onward). The common perception is that most Ivies don’t have strong engineering departments relative to strong elite schools with strong engineering schools like Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, MIT, Caltech or schools like Gtech, UIUC, UW-Seattle, UMich, etc and many of their graduates aren’t up to snuff compared with peers from strong engineering schools unless they prove otherwise.
In the engineering firms relatives worked/did hiring for, there’s a definite tendency to prioritize Cornell, Columbia and Princeton over other Ivies and even then, the CCP folks needed to go the extra mile to show they have the technical chops or else they’ll be consigned along with other Ivy engineering grads to the dumping ground for engineering grads who didn’t measure up in the eyes of the technical supervisors/executive engineers, the sales and marketing department.