<p>Prestige means nothing.</p>
<p>His rant is invalid because he goes to Michigan State.</p>
<p>Hot damn, people. It’s not like (s)he goes to Nova Southeastern University or something.</p>
<p>@wwlink: I’ll see you at Davis next year :)</p>
<p>@woeishe: Um, you’re a sophomore in high school, so don’t even.</p>
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<p>read and get out lol:
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<p>I’m sorry to say but rankings do matter, and they matter more for employment than for grad school. (and I am a college graduate by the way, not a high school kid). </p>
<p>You go to UM Ross and you have companies literally lining up to interview you. They send you personal emails asking you out to dinner so they can persuade you to interview with them the following week. For people with higher GPAs than mine, this includes companies such as McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Google. For people with just modest GPAs like me, this includes Fortune 100 companies like General Mills, GE, P&G, and Microsoft. </p>
<p>I have friends at universities like Michigan State, Virginia Tech, and Oregon State who talk about how hard it is to get a job and how little the career services center does to help them. Rankings do matter. They get you in the door at your first job, and they give you great networking connections for future managerial level jobs. </p>
<p>As to grad school, I’ve heard that unless you go to an Ivy League school, schools don’t really care where you went as long as its a top 100 school because they recognize that not everyone can go to the best school they could have gotten into for money and family reasons. </p>
<p>I’m not saying you can’t make it from a not top school, you can. And your work experience and the networks you create at your job can propel you right to the top. But be honest, going to a prestigious school helps tremendously both immediately and down the line in this world where its no just what you know, but who you know.</p>
<p>The MSU person’s rant is pretty moronic. People at second tier schools always argue that in “the real world” it doesn’t matter and that their college won’t affect their real-life success. </p>
<p>Sorry to break it to you, MSU person, but people at top schools do better in life. Wharton graduates 500-600 undergrads a year. Look at the list of alumni: it’s freaking ridiculous. Harvard only graduates 1500 students a year. MSU graduates 9000. So MSU graduates 18 times as many undergrads as Wharton and 6 times as many as Harvard. And yet there are many prominent Harvardians and Whartonites for every prominent MSU grad. I’d argue that the difference between the schools becomes GREATER in the real world when the books go away and the studying ends.</p>
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<p>One also must consider that 100% of students who are accepted to UPenn or Harvard are extremely driven and will continue to be throughout their lives. Throw a CSU Monterey Bay student into Harvard and do you honestly think he/she will go as far as someone who was actually accepted to Harvard simply because they both go to a prestigious University? Conversely, if someone accepted to Harvard has to settle for a lower tier University for whatever reason, he/she will still be able to succeed given his/her intelligence and perseverance.</p>
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I think going into business stuff is a completely different game. Strong alumni networks definitely play a larger role in that career field.
I’d definitely aim for a high ranked school if my career prospects involved management or something similar.
but if you’re going into a STEM major, the typical state school has plenty of resources at your disposal to succeed.
that’s actualyl why I was orginally reluctant to respond to the thread – good school for what?</p>