<p>^^How often would you even know the medical schools of various doctors in a desperate situation? The 911 operator or admitting clerk at the hospital or clinic is not going to offer you that choice and ask which you prefer. If it really were desperate, I’d choose whichever doc was closer or otherwise more readily available.</p>
<p>I think for Neurosurgeon it might make a difference. I don’t want somebody who went to some unknown state school to operate on my brain.</p>
<p>Assume that you do know and everthing else is equal. One is 10 mile west of you house. One is 10 mile east of you house. Please choose.</p>
<p>^^If everything else about the doctors is indeed equal in your far-fetched, hypothetical case, then it really doesn’t matter. Choose whichever one you personally like better. The doctor I chose for myself worked in clinic where most of his fellow docs went to prestigious medical schools. But he himself had graduated from a medical school in Mexico that I had never heard of. He was clearly very highly-regarded by his colleagues, and he provided me with wonderful medical care. I wish he were still around here, but he moved on to a bigger, fancier teaching hospital back east.</p>
<p>The doctors’ medical schools are not very good examples to explore the value of prestige, because the fact is doctors learn their doctoring skills, especially surgical skills, much more in their residencies and fellowships than they do in medical schools. If the guy who went to HMS did his residency at Podunk community hospital and the Ross medical school graduate did his at one of the large, top teaching hospitals, I’d choose the Ross guy in a heartbeat. This would be especially true if we were talking about surgeons.</p>
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<p>I was going to say that! It’s not “and/or” though. Top law schools is an absolute requirement – right now the tally is 5 Harvards, 3 Yales, and 1 Northwestern (the Justice appointed the longest time ago). As for colleges, it’s Princeton (2), Stanford (2), Harvard, Cornell, Chicago, Georgetown, and Holy Cross. So . . . generally pretty snazzy.</p>
<p>You don’t pick a doctor based on where they went to med school, you pick them based on their surgery success rate!! </p>
<p>For instance, if you are looking into a specific operation (tumor removal, whatever-what-have-you), then you ask how many they’ve performed/what their success rate is/what complicates have arisen etc. You compare the two doctors. Then pick.</p>
<p>Now I assume you might ask, but what if neither has ever performed the surgery you need? Well, then, why I am choosing between just these two?! Then I’ll hop on a plane and go somewhere else!!</p>
<p>Well, what if it’s a highly experimental surgery? And no one’s performed it before? (LOL far-fetched). You’re STILL going to look at their track record, not just their experience, but what kind of surgeries they do and the success rate. </p>
<p>If the doctor with 7-yr experience out of the Cayman islands has performed challenging, complicated surgeries and has had a high success rate over similar surgeries and success rates with only 5 yrs of experience out of HYPS, then I’m going with Cayman, probably, or whoever has better bedside manners ;).</p>
<p>I mean, having had several surgeries (and doctors), I have NEVER asked any of them “where did you go to school”. But I have asked others if they are satisfied with the level of care, etc. (from physicians), and I have most certainly looked into experience and success rates when it comes to surgery. I really don’t think asking a doctor where they went to med school is a typical question patients ask :P</p>
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<p>That doesn’t mean it’s a REQUIREMENT. Correlation, not causation. </p>
<p>Think about it: the upper middle class is the segment of the population which is too rich for fin-aid but generally too poor to send their kids to top undergrad. It’s also one of the SMALLEST segments of the population overall. So, if you’ve got the brains, chances are you can afford - either by virtue of being not-so-rich OR by virtue of being pretty rich - to go to the best undergrad/grad you get into. Therefore, the fact that the majority of supreme court justices had snazzy undergrad degrees is more indicative of the socio-economic trends influencing choice of attendance among the very smart/competent, not “this degree got me this job.” </p>
<p>I would say the prestige of the GRADUATE program, however, for law school, can be important when it comes to ushering you onto that track. But if you make a name for yourself as a competent lawyer, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to make it as a graduate from any school, since making a name for yourself usually comes before supreme court appointments 
Again, I think it’s a correlation not causation thing - if you’re really smart and are forced to choose a lesser known school on scholarship for financial reasons, you’re in the minority, since most people have the ability (or perceive they have the ability) to take on the debt (or they have the ability to get a scholarship at a better school!). So that doesn’t mean you’re less able to be a supreme court justice, but there is LESS of that population overall that you’re a part of, so it’s less likely in that respect that you’ll be represented. Nixon went to some unheard of undergrad, but then he went to Duke on a full scholarship for law. So you’re either rich enough or smart enough for politics, and both of those yield good things in terms of $$$$ for elite education.</p>
<p>Quite honestly, I can’t really think of ANY career that would require you to attend a Top X school. I really, really can’t. But, where you attend college isn’t just about that. It’s about finding an environment where you thrive and that will push you to work to the best of your ability. There’s benefit of going to a top college just by the virtue of the fact that everyone around you is really, really smart - you’ll be exposed to more interesting ideas, you’ll be challenged more, you’ll - theoretically - grow more intellectually, which will open you up to more careers, because you’ll go for more challenging internships, you’ll push yourself harder, you’ll be more excited about your education/the fields it opens you to, etc. The DEGREE didn’t get you the job, but the experience you had at the school DID, in a slightly indirect way. I honestly think Top X in this case, DOES make a difference - if you go to a Top 50/Top 100 school vs. fourth/fifth/never even heard of ya tier school, the quality of students is generally going to be vastly different (at least that’s the case when you compare the state flagship in my state - I believe a Top 25 public and in the Top 50 universities overall - with some of the lesser-known public - or even private - options within the state). Most smart kids can’t stand community college or a really, really unknown third tier school because they’re just not challenged…so they don’t perform to the best of their ability.</p>
<p>Top federal clerkships are also heavily weighed towards Yale & Harvard. Northwestern, not so much.</p>
<p>I’ve been told by practicing lawyers that to practice appellate law one virtually “must” have a degree “from a top [prestigious] law school” – was the way they worded it.</p>
<p>Just reporting what I heard.</p>
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<p>Actually going to an elite school can be a really good financial decision if you are middle class. With Yale’s aid plus my scholarships my parents only have to pay 1K towards tuition and books and travel expenses. The financial aid was the ONLY reason I applied to top schools in the first place, and got to say i’m loving it.</p>
<p>To those who are saying going to an elite school helps you get into an elite school you are forgeting that those who go to elite schools are intelligent to begin with and therefore are likely to pursue and get into top schools as well.</p>
<p>For example, I was talking to a person here about law schools and I mentioned that if I went to law school I would think Georgetown would be good. His retort was that for Yale students good is only the top 3 law schools. Similarly for med and other professions there is a heightened tendency to stay on the same caliber as your undergrad which causes more students from top undergrads to pursue top graduate schools as well.</p>
<p>My S insists that to obtain a job in academia, he needs a top graduate school. Only those graduates have a chance at a teaching job, with a funded lab. But, job offers are few and far between. It feels like tremendous pressure, to go to UCB or Stanford, and then get one’s only offer at Podunk U. He sees the disappointing offers the postdocs receive.</p>
<p>I don’t understand the system. Why not go to a more reach/safety school, be a great grad student, and apply to similar schools for jobs? </p>
<p>Personally, I did the latter route. My dissertation won top prize, and got me brass ring jobs. That was MANY years ago. My advice to son varies from his professors.</p>
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<p>Really, gag. How utterly pretentious on his part. Don’t tell me, let me guess - he’s an undergrad too, and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.</p>
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<p>Columbia Student, again, you just don’t get it. They don’t learn their doctoring skills in undergrad. They get the base in medical school, and it is the residency / fellowship where they learn the appropriate skills. That’s where they get the real training. That’s where they get to see the cases, work on actual patients, discuss techniques with others, etc. Dr. Fancy Elite Undergrad has <em>zero</em> advantage over Dr. Average State School when the two of them are together in residency. And for all you know, Dr. Average State School becomes the chief resident. Really. It’s time to get a grip. If we were talking law, it would be a different story since top law schools open up opportunities that lower tier law schools don’t. But medicine is different. The quality of the education offered at <em>all</em> med schools in the US is relatively uniform, and the residencies are where the craft of one’s specialty is learned / perfected.</p>
<p>And anyone who has spent any time around medicine knows that within a residency program, no one – absolutely no one – “bows down” to Fancy Undergrad doc compared to State School Undergrad doc. It is IRRELEVANT at that point. It’s irrelevant at 4 am when a patient is in trouble and you have to figure out how to react. It’s irrelevant during the question-and-answer of grand rounds. You seem to think that one wears a button that says “I went to Fancy Undergrad so I have the smart stamp!” and that it matters in medicine. It doesn’t. </p>
<p>Look, my H is a physician and he went to Fancy Undergrad. He knows. It’s not the measure of, or caliber of, a good doctor at all.</p>
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<p>Well, actually that’s not really the right way either, unless you can be assured that their patient populations are comparable to one another. Sometimes, the better doctor gets the more complicated cases in the first place - he may have a lower “success rate” but that doesn’t make him a worse doctor, just one who had a sicker patient base to begin with. You can’t compare the stats of a doc who works at an inner city teaching hospital, for example, to the stats of a doc who works at an upper middle class suburban hospital. Their patient bases are completely different.</p>
<p>You go to a “top” college to get a “top” education. </p>
<p>You should pay for it if you value that education and can afford it.</p>
<p>You do not NEED a “top” college to end up in any profession or eventually any job.</p>
<p>EDUCATION is the purpose of the top colleges not JOB PLACEMENT.</p>
<p>"I’ve been told by practicing lawyers that to practice appellate law one virtually “must” have a degree “from a top [prestigious] law school” – was the way they worded it.</p>
<p>Just reporting what I heard."</p>
<p>My friend and his partner are the principals in their appellate law firm and have argued in front of the Supreme Court while still in their 40s. Their law degrees are from USC and McGill. And yes, my friend clerked for judges in federal court.</p>
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<p>For most people, the answer would be: “whichever one is on my insurance plan”.</p>
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<p>If they both went through US-based residencies in the specialty and are board-certified, then they are qualified.</p>
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<p>Here’s some interesting trivia that I finally get to use…</p>
<p>Generally speaking, Blue CROSS pays hospitals and institutional health care providers.<br>
Blue SHIELD pays doctors and other professional providers. </p>
<p>We now return you to the real topic of this thread. :)</p>
<p>What if we further refine it to Supreme Court clerkships? …it almost tracks the T10 in descending order. Fortunately, a couple of others sneak in: BYU (thanks to Alito), GA, KS. </p>
<p>[Brian</a> Leiter Supreme Court Clerkship Placement, 2000 Thourgh 2008 Terms](<a href=“http://www.leiterrankings.com/jobs/2000_08_scotus_clerks.shtml]Brian”>Brian Leiter Supreme Court Clerkship Placement, 2000 Thourgh 2008 Terms)</p>