<p>Well Alum, I think you’ll just have to exclude yourself! I may not always agree with you but at least you are interesting.</p>
<p>I graduated in 1981 and went to work for a large computer manufacturer. Fully half the sales force and systems engineers were women, and I never experienced any prejudice that I can remember. In fact, I think there were probably incentives in manager’s performance plans to hire/promote/support women. My managers tried very hard to make things work for me when I had children, but when my husband took a foreign assignment, I took a buyout.</p>
<p>That being said, I also have two sisters with degrees in Electrical Engineering, and I think they did find themselves to be “token” females in many situations. But we lived in California, where I think the idea of women in business or engineering was a little more advanced than on the east coast. If your chem eng firm was in the midwest or east coast, I can imagine you ran into more difficulties.</p>
<p>Lifetime disadvantage of having attended an Ivy:</p>
<p>Insecure people, once they learn that detail about you, will do their darnedest to bring you down. They will delight in every mistake you make. They will make it their objective to prove you wrong so they can say “I taught that hot shot Ivy grad a thing or two.” If they encounter one Ivy graduate who is less than stellar, they will pounce on that fact with a venom and go on to proclaim: “Ivy grads are nothing special; a couple of them worked here and they were total idiots!” (an acquaintance of mine says that all the time). They will look for opportunities to imply that you may be smart, but you must have some defect like a lack of interpersonal skills or bad attitude.</p>
<p>But, individuals secure enough in their own worth and abilities, will be impressed at the hard work that accomplishment entailed and will give you a chance to prove yourself.</p>
<p>—dedicated to Barrons</p>
<p>(By the way, I’m not an Ivy grad, but have seen this disturbing pattern countless times. I see it as part of a general assault on intellectualism as well as a deadening push toward conformity.)</p>
<p>GFG: No one being ANTI-intellectual here. People are trying to make the point that to ASSUME someone is smarter based on the college they attended, even at a first impression, is absurd. For a variety of reasons. As some one pointed out early on, the entire elitist slant of many of these posts is insulting to vast numbers of people. Think about it. How many people get rejected from the Ivies, yet are fully qualified, just as smart as the ones who got accepted? Where do these people go? They don’t just disappear. They are out there working and contributing to society too. Then there are people who don’t even have a clue what “Ivies” are unless they are told. They are those people you laugh at who don’t know the difference between Penn State and UPenn. Not all people are as obsessed as people are on this board about name colleges. That does not mean they are not very smart. There are very smart people with all kinds of circumstances that preclude them from attending an Ivy. Somewhere along the way they too get educated. Please.</p>
<p>Dstark. I don’t have some kind of emotional needs for the top Princeton student to be better than the top student at CCSB. I have an intellectual need for people to stop being purposefully obtuse. </p>
<p>ON AVERAGE. ON AVERAGE. ON AVERAGE. This feels to me like a George Orwell novell. Like do I have an emotional need for people to admit that on average the sky is blue more often on average than a tree is blue? No. It’s just the facts. So ON AVERAGE it is not a bad strategy to assume that someone from an institution that screens for a certain kind of intelligence and has the capability to select for it will actually produce more grads ON AVERAGE with that characteristic. It would be a bad strategy to continue on in that assumption past 15 minutes or so of conversation or whatever that proved the assumption wrong.</p>
<p>Otherwise the whole system is a complete farce and totally meaningless. And do you all want to say that? I would argue back at you. Why do you need to deny that it is possible that some people are more academically and strictly intellectually capable than others and more of them will wind up at institutions that have the ability to be selective and screen for those characteristics?</p>
<p>BTW, this is not needing to feel superior. I know many people who have gone to CCwhatever who are superior leaders. Who have been my boss. Who are infinitely more capable than me and sometimes smarter than me. </p>
<p>BUT ON AVERAGE is what I am talking about. </p>
<p>And BTW, I don’t need great athletes to pat me on the head and tell me I am a great tennis player. I’M NOT A GREAT TENNIS PLAYER. I’M FINE WITH THAT.</p>
<p>I admit I haven’t waded through all of the posts in this thread, but I think when you’re talking about HYPS or similar private schools vs. a state school, one HUGE advantage comes to mind that I think has yet to be mentioned, namely that at those private schools, you are basically guaranteed to graduate. In other words, as long as you pay your bills and put in some bare minimal effort, you are going to pass your classes and you are going to get your degree. You might get mediocre grades, but you are still going to pass. Basically the only people who don’t graduate from schools like this are people like Bill Gates who choose not to graduate. Bill Gates left Harvard voluntarily. Even somebody like Ted Kennedy who was caught cheating on an exam at Harvard was still allowed to eventually graduate. Contrast that with the attitude of many state schools in which many students a leave involuntarily because these schools will absolutely not hesitate one bit to flunk you out. Their attitude is that if you have personal problems, romance problems, psychological problems, whatever it is, that’s too bad for you. If you don’t perform decently in the classes, you’re expelled, simple as that.</p>
<p>As an example, I would use the example of one of my old friends. He could have gone to Stanford or several of the Ivies. Instead he chose Berkeley not only for the in-state tuition but also because Berkeley offered him the Chancellor’s Scholarship which made Berkeley effectively free for him. Sounds good, right? But here’s the problem - he then flunked right out of Berkeley. Basically, he encountered a maelstrom of problems as a student. For example, he met his first real girlfriend at Berkeley, but then he found out that she had cheated on him on the night before a series of big midterm exam. Obviously he wasn’t going to do very well at all on those exams. But Berkeley didn’t care, all they saw is that he had done poorly on those exams. Combine that with some problems with personal maturity as well as serious problems with homesickness (he is Hispanic and had never lived away from his family before), and that all resulted in a poor enough performance to flunk him out. </p>
<p>While obviously we can never prove this, a number of his friends, including myself, are convinced that if he had gone to Stanford or to an Ivy, and had these same problems, he still would have graduated. Granted, he would have gotten pretty low grades. But he still would have graduated. Let’s face it. At private schools, it’s practically impossible to get any grade lower than a C. And a C average is all that you need to graduate. Berkeley, on the other hand, had absolutely no qualms about tagging him full of D’s and F’s, and that was good enough to toss him out. </p>
<p>It’s far better to go into debt to graduate from Stanford than to try to save money by going to a state school like Berkeley, only to flunk out. That’s just a case of being penny-wise, pound-foolish. By trying to save money on your degree, you wind up with no degree at all. Now, his life is just sad because he can’t get a decent job because he doesn’t have a college degree. Nor is it easy for him to get one. Berkeley doesn’t want him back, and no other half-decent school wants to take him because he flunked out of his previous college. So basically, it’s hard for him to get any degree from any school. It’s sad. </p>
<p>Incidentally, I lay most of the onus on Berkeley for this situation. I can understand that you want to expel a guy for doing poorly. But after some time has passed, you should give the guy another chance to get his degree. It’s literally more than a decade later now, and he’s a totally different person. But Berkeley STILL will not let him off the hook. Berkeley still refuses to let him back in. Not only that, but he still can’t get into any other decent school because of his poor Berkeley record. This should not be. Even Harvard let Ted Kennedy back in after kicking him out for 2 years for cheating, and Kennedy eventually graduated. For this guy, it’s been more than a decade now. Who cares about what happened more than 10 years ago? Even personal bankruptcies, by law, get wiped from your credit report after 10 years. But Berkeley still will not let him off the hook. This is evidence of the callousness that state schools often exhibit towards their students. Many times, they simply don’t care about helping their students out.</p>
<p>If the student body is “on average stronger” do you get a better education? If you believe that then send your kids to schools where you think the students “on average” are stronger. </p>
<p>Just don’t tell me to elevate the students at these schools to some kind of elite status because they go to schools like that. </p>
<p>I’m more interested in the individual than the school.</p>
<p>GFG…So don’t go to an elite school because idiots (or anyone who didn’t go to such a school for that matter) will put you down? Not all people are neurotic or insecure to let an a$$ bother them. Moreover, many people who didn’t go to such a school will pat the elite school attendee patronizingly saying you must have done well a) in high school, b) on standardized tests, c)l in the lucky sperm pool, d) in athletics or e) some combination of the above. All in all a pretty harmless (but perhaps annoying) critique worth putting up with for the benefit of a fine education.</p>
<p>Remember, the highest paid teachers are found at the elite schools. The elite schools simply get first pick. Remember, elite schools have fantastic endowments and spend more per student than others. Remember, most elite schools don’t have ‘fashion merchandising’ or ‘public relations’ majors and focus on perpetuating a life time love of learning rather than job training. Please don’t bring up neurosis as an argument against a kid trying to better themselves.</p>
<p>I have actually learned more by reading this board about the mindset of people who have attended or are attending the “elites” than I every wanted to know, this thread especially. Parents of said people also.</p>
<p>Lifetime Disadvantage of attending an IVY:
Perceived isolation from the pack due to feelings of superiority. Free floating anxiety due to the feeling that eveyone is jealous of your intellecutal capacity and talent.
Let’s get real here. It’s not the Ivy background - it’s the atitude of the student and/or parent. It’s clear that some (not all) on this board feel that they received a vastly superior education at an Ivy and are proud to report that they spent four glorious years with with intellectual “equals”. That atitude (spoken or unspoken) can easily offend those outside of this circle, many of whom are just as bright as Ivy students (without the $, opportunities, connections, etc). No this in not ANTI -intellectualism. One of my best friends is what I would call a “super intellectual”. She’s a bit different but highly engaging and we all love her (and she’s a state U grad too - not that it matters one bit).</p>
<p>Packers1 You offer to cc what it greatly lacks, a professional who hires college graduates into the real world of work. My dad also hires and promotes peolple for a well known world wide company. He states MIT grads may be offered $500 more a year as new hires but after that it’s what you do for the company… not where you went to school. Teamwork, willingness to work the extra hours, getting the job done: these are what get you noticed and promoted in todays world.</p>
<p>GFG–I don’t think I have ever said anything negative about the Ivy schools perse. I have only a few posts on this thread and just provided some counter-facts when some over the top claims were made. I was just having a little fun wondering how the fact that you graduated from Princeton gave you instant cred in business. I mean how would anyone know unless you worked it into the conversation or you wore some identifier like the big ring all the TAMU grads wear. Just having some grins.
Now I know why I try to stay out of the ****ing match threads like the Duke Lacrosse and this one.</p>
<p>Final score just in-Harvard 15, Wisconsin 15.</p>
<p>Alumother, I’m actually a little surprised to hear that you come from an Ivy academic family, given how prestige conscious you are. Having lived in neighborhoods in Boston, Providence and NYC popular with academics at elite schools, here’s a sampling of where professor’s kids go (if they don’t go to mom or dad’s school with the tuition break):
Beloit
U. Chicago
CT College
Bard
Macalester
Reed
JHU
Cal Tech
RPI
Wellesley
Rice</p>
<p>I can’t think of a Columbia professor who thought it was “worth it” to send a kid to Brown if it meant paying for it; similarly, Brown professor’s kids don’t go to Dartmouth. In fact, the choices of college were decidedly not about the prestige factor… and everything about the quality of teaching, about which a professor would know a thing or two. To claim that people are disparaging your father if they question the lifetime value of an elite education is absurd… there are brilliant academics at the top of their field at GA Tech, U Arizona, U Missouri, and a host of public institutions which don’t make it to the lists which include Berkeley, Michigan and UVA. They constitute their own elite… people in their fields know that they are at the pinnacle, and they don’t need to be at a Dartmouth or Cornell to know that they have reached the top in academia.</p>
<p>Again, I can only cite my own experience… an elite grad school education seems to have given me a free ride in a lot of professional situations…elite undergrad was a great experience which enriched my life and which I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciate, but I still find it hard to imagine that I would have been short-changed in a meaningful way if I’d ended up in a less rarified environment.</p>
<p>I’ll bet if you did an analysis of Nobel’s, Pulitzers, Macarthurs, etc. you’d find that CCNY or its ilk bests the IVY’s in each category. Xiggi? One of our statistically minded posters? Care to take me up on it?</p>
<p>There is a lifetime advantage from going to a college where:</p>
<p>1) You were happy and made good friends.</p>
<p>2) You enjoyed learning and felt able to work up to your full potential and were inspired to push yourself beyond what you thought were your limits.</p>
<p>3) You respected your professors and received recognition of your abilities from them.</p>
<p>4) After graduation you became part of a supportive alumni network.</p>
<p>5) You were not overwhelmed by debts upon graduation.</p>
<p>6) You learned how to get along with a variety of people and increased your flexibility and tolerance.</p>
<p>Anyone lucky enough to benefit in these ways will continue to reap benefits over their lifetime --mostly in ways that cannot be so easily quantified.</p>