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<p>Sorry, Doug, but I thought that went the way of anti-trust. In California, Anthem-BC competes directly with BS for all providers.</p>
<p>I think there is really a differentiation here between undergrad and graduate schools. For graduate schools I think it does still matter a bit (with the possible exception of med school… as others have said the insurance company pays you the same paltry rate regardless of if you have a degree from Harvard Medical School or Backwoods State Medical College).</p>
<p>However, for undergrad it really doesn’t matter too much… the most important thing is to attend a school that is the best fit for the student and where the student can develop and display their full potential.</p>
<p>Spending a lot of money to attend a particular undergrad school because it’s honestly the best fit for the student could be a good decision. Spending a lot of money to attend a particular undergrad school because of its ‘name’ with the thinking that this will somehow give one a leg up is generally a very poor, and expensive, decision.</p>
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<p>I have a close friend who also clerked for a federal judge. She didn’t go to a top-ranked law school or undergraduate school. She was, however, first in her law school class. Her view is that being first in her class is what got her the clerk position and that she’d never have been considered if she didn’t have such a high ranking. After clerking, my friend got a job at an elite law firm in the city where she clerked–she was the first graduate of her law school that the firm had hired–since she was hired (she’s a partner now) there are still only a few people recruited from her alma mater. My friend’s view is that to get in the door for some jobs in the legal field–you need to go to a highly ranked school or be the highest achiever in a school that’s not highly ranked.</p>
<p>You can do anything in this society - at least to date - with an education from any college. It’s America, after all, and elitism does not trump productivity, innovation, brilliance in the end.</p>
<p>That said, having an elite academic pedigree can make a the journey to the top of professions much easier. A degree from a top college signals high intelligence, stamina, focus, your general ability to differentiate yourself against the toughest competition. Yes, honors college diplomas from non-prestige schools look very nice as well. But elite degree generally confers a bigger leg up.</p>
<p>Regarding medicine: Sure, you can become a doc going to any med school and in general patients don’t ask where you received your training (I do actually). But if your ambition is to be a thought leader in your medical specialty, to rise to the top of the research and academic medicine world, head up the NIH, get named dean of top med schools, that sort of heady stuff – then it’s going to be a huge advantage to go to HMS vs. state U (unless we’re talking UCSF and U Mich, maybe).</p>
<p>My sense about law is that if you want to practice Big Law you go to a Big Law School. Sure, there will be strivers who break into those ranks without the pedigree, but the swifter pathway is via the elite education route.</p>
<p>Finally, I’ve worked at many universities and it is abundantly clear that landing a plum tenure track assistant professorship in history or anthropology or sociology or English literature is going to be vastly helped by an elite education pedigree. Probably not to the same degree in the technical fields, but the truth is that academics are the biggest academic snobs, whether they are on faculty at the state U or Harvard.</p>
<p>Dean of Harvard Med: BS: CUNY, MD: Mt Sinai
Dean of Johns Hopkins Med: BA: Ohio Wesleyan, MD: University Rochester
Director of NIH: BA:UVA, MD:UNC</p>
<h1>44 and #45 do not contradict each other.</h1>
<p>It is easier to get the tenure track assistant professorship with a name-brand college degree. It is not easier to advance to the top. Nobody gets tenure (or deanship) because of where their degrees are from.</p>
<p>Interesting discussion. In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell points out it’s not necessary to go to a ‘top’ school to do really well and receive international acclaim. He has several chapters on this. He says there is really no difference between top schools and a lot of ‘good’ schools in terms of ‘achievement’. Here is some of his supporting data:</p>
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<p>He also lists the last 5 American Nobel Laureautes in Medicine. It’s just as a diverse list as the above (Don’t have time to type it in right now). He goes on to state that *“Apparently to win a Nobel Prize you have to be smart enough to get into a school at least as good as Notre Dame or the University of Illinois. That’s all.” <a href=“Notre%20Dame%20and%20U%20of%20Illinois%20were%20on%20the%20Medicine%20Nobel%20Prize%20list”>/i</a>.</p>
<p>He also says on that same page * “Given what we are learning about about intelligence, the idea that schools can be ranked, like runners in a race, makes no sense”*</p>
<p>It’s a very interesting book. Dispels a lot of myths about how people become successful. It is true, in certain circles, that going to a top schools can make it easier to ‘break -in’ a particular group of corporations or even career field. But there are so many other factors that go into becoming successful, that a person can easily overcome not going to the ‘right’ school and still reach the top. This book is a real eye-opener.</p>
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<p>I beg to differ:</p>
<p>Post #44: But if your ambition is to be a thought leader in your medical specialty, to rise to the top of the research and academic medicine world, head up the NIH, get named dean of top med schools, that sort of heady stuff – then it’s going to be a huge advantage to go to HMS vs. state U</p>
<p>Post #45: Dean of Harvard Med: BS: CUNY, MD: Mt Sinai
Dean of Johns Hopkins Med: BA: Ohio Wesleyan, MD: University Rochester
Director of NIH: BA:UVA, MD:UNC</p>
<p>Answer to OP’s question: There is no profession in which going to a top X school is a functional prerequisite. However, that does not mean that the path will not be somewhat more difficult for the kid who goes to the less than top X school. Even I-banking and the high-end strategy consulting firms, both of which are quite name-conscious, have people from non-fancy schools. Sometimes the route in is more indirect than the typical path. </p>
<p>More importantly, I’d venture a guess that except for the people who make the rankings and the OC’s at CC, most human beings don’t know the rankings below the name schools whose in the top X and where they might rank( they probably know that HPYSM are on top; they know Michigan and Berkeley are great state schools, maybe know that Williams and Amherst are great LACs, etc.). [I don’t know the top 50 rankings or even the top 20 and I attended three high-end schools, spent the first few years of my career as a professor at a high-end school and, was offered positions at others].</p>
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<p>Bingo. Now, compare that with the similar pinnacle of law (the US Supreme Court) in which the pedigrees are all top undergrad and grad schools. </p>
<p>This point bears repeating. Harvard Med, which everyone drools over as The Ultimate Med School that I Must Attend to Get Anywhere in Medicine Or Otherwise I Won’t Be Qualified to Start an IV, is headed by a doctor with a BS from CUNY. Some people need just to get with the real world, where talent and excellence rise to the top and the signaling effect of your undergrad or grad withers away after a while.</p>
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<p>In the case of Supreme Court justices it’s not a coincidental correlation. Where you went to law school is actually carefully considered as part of the vetting process by the congress, by the press, and by the public. Recall that one of the criticisms of Harriet Miers when she was nominated was that she had only gone to law school at SMU - a perfectly respectable law school but apparently not good enough for the rarified heights of the US Supreme Court. As I said, there is no official Supreme Court requirement to go to a top law school, but there certainly is a de facto one.</p>
<p>Re: this discussion about medicine requiring a top undergraduate school, I will tell you that there is no correlation whatsoever between attending an “elite” undergraduate school and success at admission to any medical school. Further, attending an “elite” medical school, eg., Harvard, is no guarantee of a ticket to the top of the food chain. Actually most physicians are regarded by the residency program in which they train. In my own case attending two good but not “elite” undergraduate and medical schools, Clark and Tufts respectively, I ended up completing my residency training at Stanford. In the world of medicine I’m a “Stanford-trained specialist.” Nobody cares (except maybe my mother) where I attended college. I can’t speak to other professions requiring doctoral level degrees, but I know this to be true about medicine.</p>
<p>Absolutely, ClarkAlum. And the thing is … when it comes time for residency match, yes, to some extent they look at where you went u-grad and med school, but they look more as to where you stand in your med school class, and to a very large extent on your personal interview. So really, a top notch residency program can have Harvard Med grads and State Med School grads side by side, and no one cares. It doesn’t matter at that point. </p>
<p>And top notch residency programs aren’t necessarily affiliated with hotshot med schools. For example, in my city, there are 3 major residency programs. 2 are affiliated with top 20 universities; 1 is affiliated with a mid-tier medical school. However, the one affiliated with the mid-tier medical school is better than the other 2 in some specialties / residency areas. The location of the teaching hospital and the kind of patient population it attracts is also critical. The less “prestigious” inner city teaching hospital often offers a more rigorous residency in some specialties than a teaching hospital that is in a more affluent area.</p>
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Pizzagirl, of course, I get it. I have several doctors in my family. But I say it might give me warm fuzzy feeling before I let this doctor operate on my brain. The one I know locally has a undergrate from MIT, MD from Stanford, and head of something from Mass General Hospital, as well as lecturer at Harvard Medical school. It’s just me, I pay for top quality especially if it’s for my brain. I don’t take chances. If you want to take chances with your brain, go ahead. It’s your life.</p>
<p>Mr. Columbia–
I have seen some real geeks from prestigious undergraduate and medical schools. One Harvard medical student with whom I did a surgical rotation in my 3rd year couldn’t learn how to tie a simple surgical knot. When he was finally given an opportunity to tie a stitch in the OR he sewed his glove into the surgical field. I wouldn’t have let him carve on one of my pumpkins let alone operate on my brain. There is absolutely no correlation between the level of prestige of an attended medical school and later success in the profession. When I was growing up my grandmother who lived in Miami Beach used to brag about how good her doctor was: “you should see his fancy waiting room.” If the trappings make you feel warm and fuzzy, then God Bless. For me, I’d rather know how many similar surgeries he/she’s done, what the mortality/morbidity is for surgical patients in his/her hands and/or at the specific institution, what the infection rate is, other hospital acquired complication rate, length of stay, etc., etc.</p>
<p>Billy Pilgrim #48: The quote you gave from #44 specifies the MEDICAL school, not the undergrad school. Mt.Sinai, UNC and Rochester <em>are</em> top caliber medical schools.</p>
<p>The Hopkins Dean did a residency and fellowship at Harvard Med.
The Harvard Med Dean did a residency first at Mt Sinai and then was at NIH.
The NIH director (whose main misson is research) got his PhD at Yale.</p>
<p>You can certainly start at a no-name undergrad college and work your way up, but the main thrust of post#44 was that if you want to be a leader in the field of medicine, it helps to have a strong ‘pedigree’. </p>
<p>I thought post #44 was very much on the money, starting with the opening comment:</p>
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<p>That’s because you’re assuming that if your doc went to State U vs Harvard, it’s because he wasn’t smart. Plenty of intelligent people may have grown up in situations where elite educations weren’t emphasized, or they might not have been able to have afforded an elite u (especially if they knew that med school was down the pike), or they needed to stay close to home to care for an ailing parent, or … whatever. Maybe they weren’t high achievers in hs and cranked it in college. There are a million different reasons and it just has nothing whatsoever to do with medical competence. Medicine isn’t like law, where your “product” is mostly your intellectual acumen and reasoning skills. To a large extent, many parts of medicine - esp surgical specialties - are about your technical motor skills / technique mastery, your patience, your fortitude, your ability to react well and stay composed in a crisis, etc. Not to mention your people skills. There’s no a priori reason to assume that Harvard u-grad > State u-grad when it comes to medicine. And the distribution of the big-shot names within medicine proves that. For example, in a particular diagnostic area I’m familiar with, the leading expert in that area is affiliated with the U of Cincinnati. He’s reputable because of his knowledge and skill in this area, not his pedigree.</p>
<p>I attended graduation at UT-Houston medical school a couple of years ago. Several of the graduates were admitted to residency programs in specialties that selected only two or three residents from the WHOLE COUNTRY. Many, many were heading for top residency programs. The undergrad degrees were all over the map- a number from state schools, including non-flagships and other schools that would not be given much respect here on CC. It made quite an impression on me after all my years on this forum. Medical training really is a different animal.</p>
<p>Right. People really don’t get it on this forum. Medical schools have people from HYP and people from third-tier state schools all mixed in. Residency programs have people from elite med school and third-tier med schools all mixed in. And when you are in med school, and when you are in residency, the “pedigrees” of your fellow doctors / doctors-in-training just don’t matter. You’re all in the same boat, paddling madly to stay afloat! There’s no status at that point in having gone to a fancier u-grad or fancier med school. </p>
<p>Really, think about it. Open your phone book and look at all the doctors there. There are pages and pages. Who could possibly believe that all of those people had to have gone to elite u’s and elite med schools? </p>
<h2>BTW, the residency match really is a relatively sane way of allocating people to slots – it would be great if it could be applied to u-grad somehow. </h2>
<p>I have been hanging out with a lot of residents lately. I ask them a lot of questions about their choices for medical schools and residency programs. They are ALL adamant that it simply does not make sense to come out of medical school with any debt that is not necessary. In other words- go with the money. These residents are at a top program and are in various specialties, all of which are strong at this teaching hospital. They said you want to go to medical school in a major city where there are patients brought in from all over. You see more and learn more that way. They said some schools have a reputation for being more cut-throat than others and some have a reputation for freezing out lower year medical students from any research opportunities. None of them felt hampered in their residency match process by the fact that they did not attend medical school at a school normally associated with prestige here on CC. It just doesn’t matter.</p>