The End of the Ivy League As We Know It?

Parents Forum
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<p>Hardworking, your logic is fallacious. I have been hiring MBA’s for over 20 years and Harvard is not universally considered “the best in our nation”. If you are hiring grads for jobs in consumer products marketing, Northwestern (Kellogg) is better. If you are hiring for rocket science/quant jobs on Wall Street, Chicago and Sloan (MIT) are better. If you’re hiring for Venture Capital, Stanford is better. There are many people who hire MBA’s for a living who believe that overall, Tuck (Dartmouth) is better than Harvard if you are looking for overall rigor and depth (regardless of the industry you are hiring.) I would prefer a top student at Wharton over a top student at Harvard for a typical banking/finance type role, but would prefer a student from Columbia over both Wharton and Harvard if I were hiring for a media company or ad agency.</p>

<p>I don’t need to give you evidence. The fact that recruiters still shlep up to Hanover NH or head out to Chicago in the snow every winter to hire MBA’s is all the evidence you need. Harvard Business School is a great institution, but I don’t know a single company in the US which ONLY recruits at Harvard.</p>

<p>Good luck making decisions about your career based on what the guy at the gas station has to say about MBA’s. Harvard’s curriculum and emphasis on the case method has many critics; students can come out of Harvard and inch deep and a mile wide as a result of how the program is formulated; there are students a few miles down the road at MIT who graduate from their MBA program with actual expertise in a corporate function which many employers prefer.</p>

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<p>“I don’t know a single company in the US which ONLY recruits at Harvard.” Again, I never expressed these statements. I know that various business schools have their own specialities. Coming from Chicago myself, I know that Kellogg and Booth are solid MBA programs and they also lead the industry in various fields (similar to the ones you mentioned above). I’m not trying to compare Harvard vs. Stanford vs. Wharton vs. Tuck vs. Booth vs. Kellogg. </p>

<p>The comparisons I dislike are the ones that have been mentioned in this thread & implied in the article. Comparison’s like UCLA/UW-Madison/etc. vs. Harvard/Kellogg/Wharton/etc. These upper-tier business programs <em>clearly</em> beat the ones found at lower-tier schools. I’ve met undergraduates and MBAs from lower-tier programs, and they openly admit that schools such as Booth, Kellogg, Tuck, Wharton, Stanford, etc. have stronger/better programs than theirs (though they are still having a blast at their school). </p>

<p>Bottom line: I understand a myriad of factors go into future employment success. I’m not debating that. I’m also not debating Kellogg vs. Booth vs. Harvard, etc. What I am debating is the merits of trying to compare lower-tiered business programs (such as the Wisconsin School of Business at UW Madison) with upper-tiered business programs (Kellogg, Booth, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, etc.). It’s completely ridiculous, because these schools in the upper-tier are in the upper-tier for a reason; the rankings (who’s 1 vs 2 vs 3) may be baseless/up for debate, but which schools are in the upper-tier shouldn’t be. </p>

<p>Again, I admit, understand, comprehend, acknowledge (throw in whatever synonym to those terms you want) that future success, as proven by the author of the original article, isn’t solely based on what school you come from. What’s frustrating is the constant attempts at equating the status of these two completely different tiers.</p>

<p>PS. My parents went and received Masters/PhD at UW-Madison, and they loved it. Nevertheless, they are the first ones to admit that Wharton is and most likely will always be a stronger program than the business program at Madison, and to equate the strength/ability of these two programs is ridiculous.</p>

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Out of curiosity, where do you get the list and where do you split the tiers? At which number do you fall out of the top tier. Because I believe in the latest USNews Haas beats out Tuck. </p>

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<p>That’s a pretty quick turnaround between post 160 and post 162.</p>

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<p>In response to your post bovertine, I honestly don’t have a set number at the cut off. Haas (at UC Berkley for those of you who aren’t immersed in business school names) is a pretty good school and one that I would call upper-tier. If you really need a numbers based example, we can use UW Madison (#34 from your US News ranking) vs. Tuck (9) or Hass (7). I like to view rankings more in tiers and less in a set cut-off (top 10, top 20, etc.) but if you want numbers, those are some I can provide for you. Here’s the link to the US News list for those who are curious: [Best</a> Business School Rankings | MBA Program Rankings | US News](<a href=“http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/mba-rankings]Best”>http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/mba-rankings) </p>

<p>And regarding the Harvard comment, I didn’t expect individuals to take my “Harvard Business School is the best” as a slant against Tuck, Haas, etc. Moreover, I didn’t really explain well that I view there are tiers. I still believe HBS to be #1, and I respect that others have differing opinions and that industry matters (as blossom presents). What I don’t understand is why some posts are equating or implying that the caliber of HBS could be equal to that of, again, say UW Madison, and that because you could be successful at UW Madison, we should encourage less individuals trying their hardest to get into a top-tier business program (Kellogg, Wharton, Booth, the list goes on). </p>

<p>Again, I’m not calling out UW Madison’s program specifically; my parents went there (for other graduate programs) and one of my friends goes there for business (and he openly admits to tiers in business education)—not a personal attack on UW Madison by any means.</p>

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<p>^^^
Ok. Reasonable thoughts.</p>

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<p>Well, another 11 pages of people arguing about whether it’s nuts to buy a Lexus when a Ford will get you there just as well.</p>

<p>What the Ivies (and similar schools) do is admit only high-achieving kids. So if you want to go to a school where there isn’t a large gap between the highest and lowest achieving kids, the Ivies (and similar) provide this. Many of us think that this alone is enough of a reason to pay a premium, just as some people think that a nice sound system and seat warmers is enough reason to pay a premium for a car.</p>

<p>Other things are debatable–whether you’ll make more money, whether your connections will be better, etc. So what?</p>

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<p>hardworking21: It’s a huge mistake to generalize what you know about business schools to college in general. It is basically true that for law schools and business schools, there is a relatively clear hierarchy of schools – at least at the top of the ladder. It may not matter much whether you attend #1 or #3, or #7 vs. #5, but #1 vs. #7 would be a significant difference, and #7 vs. #14 would be almost different categories. (The difference between #20 and #30, though, would probably be meaningless, or more precisely dependent on other factors. If you were going to law school and wanted to live and work in New York City, Fordham would be a much better choice than the University of Texas, despite the latter’s higher ranking.)</p>

<p>But that’s not even true of other graduate or professional programs. It’s not true of medical schools (where ranking barely matters at all, except for people looking for academic careers) or education schools; it is true of government/policy schools. With PhDs, depending on the field going to Wisconsin could easily be better than going to Harvard, although the overall numbers will tell you that Harvard is the better choice for most people. If you are someone interested in sociology of gender (just making this up), Wisconsin might be much better than Harvard, and you wouldn’t particularly care that people in other subfields of sociology – not to mention people in myriad other academic disciplines – would and should prefer Harvard to Wisconsin.</p>

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<p>JHS- I don’t agree with your statement that 1 vs. 7 is a significant difference.</p>

<p>I think in Law you either attended HYS vs. any of the other top 14, or you attended somewhere else. Period. And maybe an extra few points for getting into Yale given how small the class is. I don’t think there are meaningful differences between Columbia and Northwestern or NYU and Georgetown. And to your point, geography takes over past the top 14 and there is other “noise” that complicates the issue.</p>

<p>Business schools have a different structure to their rankings. You have programs like Thunderbird and UNC which are greatly beloved by recruiters, even if they don’t show up as top 10 schools according to some other methodology. You have programs like Yale’s, which is widely perceived as having the biggest disconnect between the quality of its B-school (not top tier, but the second rung) and the quality of virtually every other program at the U (usually ranked in the top 3 or top 5). You have a program like Baruch which mysteriously manages to get a few students every year hired by companies which don’t recruit at Baruch or at any other peer institution – which then reflects favorably back on next year’s students at Baruch. Etc.</p>

<p>As a recruiter, I don’t track MBA rankings all that much even though I care about the academic rigor of the program VERY MUCH and care about the overall quality of the student body to a great degree. It is meaningless to me that a student has a 4.0 average at a Business School where the typical student has a 550 GMAT score. How quantitatively rigorous was the class in Operations Research or Statistics or Econometrics where the peer group comes in with a weak background in math?</p>

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I was certain we were going to resolve the debate once and for all this time, then just pin this thread for people to see the correct answer. :D</p>

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<p>There are always a few interesting new twists, so I keep reading them.</p>

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<p>Note that the difference may be greater when you look for maintenance and repairs. While a Lexus may cost about twice what a Ford does, a basic oil change, tire rotation, and inspection service may cost six times more at a Lexus dealer than at a Ford dealer.</p>

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<p>But at the Lexus dealership you get a bagel while you wait.</p>

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<p>blossom, how can you say #1 vs. #7 isn’t a significant difference and in the next breath say in law its HYS vs. any other top 14 vs. the field? To my mind, that’s exactly what I was saying. Not that #7 is dog-poop by any means, just that you can tell the difference. I went to what at the time was the clear #3 law school, and my wife went to what at the time would have been #6 or #7. While plenty of her classmates got the same kinds of jobs plenty of my classmates did, and there were a handful – and only a handful – of people at each school who struggled in the job market, on the whole things were much, much easier for my classmates than hers. And if you looked at some specific top-of-the-class prestige meters (federal appellate and Supreme Court clerkships, law school faculty hires) the difference was “lots” vs. “a few”.</p>

<p>And, yes, while in law there is a really meaningful gap between #14 and #15 (or maybe between #15 and #16; I am a little confused about the difference between some of the schools in the “t14” and UCLA), I think there is a somewhat meaningful gap between #7 or #8 and #14, too. I used to say it was important to go to a top-10 school in law, but that there were 4 or 5 schools that could make a decent claim to be #10. The only difference now is that some of those schools have solidified their positions more. But if someone is looking at law schools today, UVa or Penn vs. Duke or Cornell is not something you would shrug your shoulders and flip a coin over, notwithstanding that Duke and Cornell are both perfectly wonderful law schools.</p>

<p>With regard to business schools, you clearly know more than I do, but there it seems there is a similar set of clumped schools at the tip of the pyramid, and it gets regional very fast after that, maybe well before #14. Sure, Tuck has a lot of fans, which is why it is in the top-whatever, but that doesn’t mean it is as safe a bet as Harvard or Wharton, or even Sloan or Booth. And Thunderbird – hell yeah! my brother went there! – does a great job in a pretty narrow space. So even though I am less sure which is #7 and which is #14 in business schools, I am pretty confident you can tell the difference between them, and between either of them and Wharton or Harvard. (Heck, Yale is probably around #14, and no one even pretends it can play on the varsity yet.)</p>

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<p>This is why I have always believed that schools should be “analyzed” from the bottom up. Rankings such as the USNews perpetuate that selectivity is based on the achievements of the top percent. Self-anointed gurus a la Matthews believe high schools are best measured by their AP/IB prowess. I happen to think that USNews should add a category for the bottom 25 percent.</p>

<p>After all, is there a difference between Princeton and Berkeley? Small one if one believes the numbers reported in California. Huge one if looking at the bottom quartile, the Spring admits, and the brisk transfer action from JUCOs.</p>

<p>Third year students are in very different worlds at P and Cal.</p>

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<p>This is my beef with the rankings. UCB, UCLA and USC take thousands of transfer students every year; students whose hs GPA/SAT scores would not have gotten them a whiff as freshman applicants. For me, they are not in the same league with the Ivies for this reason alone.</p>

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<p>Wow, xiggi. I think you have things completely ass-backward. </p>

<p>“Third year students are in very different worlds at P and Cal.” Well, yes and no. The median third year student at Cal is very different from the median third year student at Princeton, not to mention the bottom-quartile students at each. But the bottom-quartile students at Cal didn’t have a realistic chance of going to Princeton, so that’s no surprise.</p>

<p>To me, the more relevant question is whether someone in the top 10% of the class at Cal – equivalent to about half Princeton’s class – is in a “very different world” than most Princeton students. And I think the answer to that is “not really”. They have to breathe the same air that less-skilled students breathe, but that’s true of most of us. The simple fact that they have graduated from Cal won’t tell people as much about them as the simple fact that a Princetonian has graduated from Princeton. But in terms of the educational opportunities they have, what’s the big difference? The fact that Cal is also educating a bunch of people who aren’t at their level doesn’t detract from what they are capable of doing. And for the people at the bottom of the class, the question isn’t whether they are getting a Princeton-like education – probably not – it’s whether they are getting something at Cal they couldn’t get at Northridge or Arizona State. Maybe yes, maybe no.</p>

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That’s the $200,000 question. I think the answer to this will be one thing at Cal or Virginia, but something quite different at some other flagships. It probably depends on what your major is, too.</p>

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<p>I have heard (maybe from here on CC, I can’t remember), that employers are asking these (UCB, UCLA, USC) grads whether they were 4-year students or transfers. As an employer, I’d also want to know what their ranking was. There is no way a bottom-quartile-transfer grad from UCB had the same quality and quantity of that quality education as a Princeton top 10%-er.</p>

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<p>Hunt, I agree with you that the answer may be different at different schools. At Cal, the ceiling is as high as it is at Princeton (which is to say, nonexistent). There aren’t as many stray pots of money floating around, faculty aren’t required to pay attention to you, and you don’t exist in a little Shagri-La of exclusiveness. You don’t have an eating club. So it’s not like the Cal experience will ever be the same as the Princeton experience. But the Cal faculty and graduate students are not systematically inferior to the Princeton faculty and grad students. So with a little moxie, a good student at Cal is going to have access to great educational opportunities, and if he takes advantage of them, he’s not going to mind not having gone to Princeton.</p>

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<p>I have it completely ass-backwards, but you follow with a yes and no commentary which really does not address my points. Sorry but that does not make much sense. </p>

<p>Oh well.</p>

<p>PS For the record, I could not disagree more with you regarding Cal. The MAJORITY of Cal students would not come close to get admitted at HYPS. And, if that mattered, while there are a number of cross-admits between Stanford and Cal, we KNOW that all, except a handful each year, attend Stanford. And I do not see it very different for HYP. </p>

<p>Simply stated, the student bodies are NOT interchangeable. Not at all. The could have, should have does not matter.</p>