<p>I see it as a tradeoff between handicaps. Few people would argue that undergrad prestige has ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT on one’s future career. How deep does the effect go? That’s for you to judge in each individual case. If you have to take on X amount of debt in order to afford Y prestige, then you’ll have to pick a handicap: debt or a “harder” path to success. Sometimes the answer is obvious–if FA means that you’ll have only a little debt, or if you’re choosing between Stanford and UMich rather than Stanford and Ball State. Sometimes the answer is not so obvious; so do the research, make a choice, and live well with it.</p>
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<p>Agree with the above but will also mention that law firms may hire from known (especially locally known) but lesser ranked law schools, but won’t go deep into the class. Recruiters may invite back someone in the top third of the class from Stanford Law School but may only invite back the top 2 kids from UC Davis Law School, for example.</p>
<p>I won’t re-hash all the law school discussions that have already taken place on a number of places on CC, but it isn’t all that cut and dry. If you want to work at a top firm in Dallas, you are very well-served going to UTexas or SMU. Do well in law school and the job is yours. Same with Nashville firms- UTN (have to do pretty well) and Vanderbilt with a number of grads from Georgia and Samford (yes,Samford in B-ham). Want to settle down in Kansas City? Look no further than KU. Not every future lawyer has an interest in Wall Street. Most do not. I sure didn’t. I did happen to go to a top four law school (back in the day) and it opened doors for me and continues to do so 30 plus years later. I went to that law school from a Big Ten undergrad school. The General Counsel of our company who is highly regarded in the business and legal community (Fortune 200) went to a Tier 2 law school after getting an MBA from a “non-prestigious” school.<br>
There are just so many factors to consider.</p>
<p>Ok…</p>
<p>well it looks like a person needs to go to an elite law school for some law firms and to be a SUPREME - but, perhaps undergrad choice is less important.</p>
<p>As for the rest of the thousands of professions out there…it doesn’t look like a person has to go to a top 20 or even top 50 school to be successful or to get into a top med/business/law/grad school.</p>
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<p>It would be absurd to think of educational pedigree as a “requirement” for all but a few elite/elitist professions (e.g. Supreme Court Justice, IB). However, the fact remains that attending a “regular” or “unknown” school–especially if you don’t intend to stay in the same geographic region–can be a not-insignificant handicap.</p>
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<p>Sigh. But for the vast majority of physicians, who don’t want to go into academia or head the NIH, Harvard Med doesn’t afford them anything more than any other med school. </p>
<p>For the workaday physician - who just wants to go and set up or join an existing practice and go be a pediatrician, or a gynecologist, or an eye doctor, or whatever - his work life and earnings aren’t going to be any different coming out of Harvard Med than out of State Flagship Med School. His earnings are going to be a function of *how well he runs the office and business end of things, * which has nothing to do with whether he went to Harvard Med or State Flagship Med (or Harvard u-grad or State u-grad). And there will be absolutely nothing different in his average workday, situations faced, etc. based on his undergrad. It’s totally different from law, where an elite law grad will have a far easier time getting into certain firms and dealing with certain intellectual issues. </p>
<p>Actually I think the advice for an aspiring physician to save money on u-grad by going to state u is not a bad one, unless the family is well off such that it’s not an issue.</p>
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<p>Once you find / succeed in your first job, that’s all people will be looking at anyway. A fancy u-grad serves a good signaling purpose as a “smart stamp,” but after that, it’s your job performance and personal qualities.</p>
<p>Instead of sigh-ing p-girl, just READ critically. I clearly posted “top” professional schools, and I clearly commented that the vast majority of future physicians who just wanna practice…</p>
<p>But carry on… :)</p>
<p>keil… you misquoted me…</p>
<p>I said…</p>
<p>* **it doesn’t look **like a person has to go to a top 20 or even top 50 school to be successful or to get into a top med/business/law/grad school. *</p>
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<p>Yes, Keilexandra, it is plain common sense and I really don’t understand why it is so hard for people to acknowledge that these things are not black-and-white. </p>
<p>I’ve noticed a lot of posts on CC are about justifying choices that people have made for themselves or their children. If you chose (or nudged your children) to attend the less prestigious full-scholarship school, then you will spend the rest of your time trying to prove again and again that you did not disadvantage yourself or your children in any way. If you chose to incur a lot of debt to attend the prestigious schools, you go through life talking up how valuable that choice was for yourself.</p>
<p>mom2collegekids - I copy-pasted that quote, evidently before you edited your wording. It’s rather misleading to imply that it was an intentional misquote on my part.</p>
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<p>Or, you could be like me and H - we incurred no debt to go to prestigious schools (because we were fortunate enough to come from full pay families), we are more than delighted to be full pay for our kids wherever they go, we’re very pleased with the experience at our own prestigious school and believe that it opens some doors that are otherwise less accessible, but don’t believe it’s the deal-breaker for life that it gets pitched as on CC and that ultimately, the cream rises to the top anyway.</p>
<p>And if financial success is pitched as the measure of success, good grief, it takes no imagination whatsoever to look around and see tons of very successful people with average-tier educations. And by very successful, I’m not just talking standard upper middle class - I’m talking several multi million dollar homes, first class vacations, significant donations to charity, etc. There’s just a lot of money out there and I find it really naive to assume it’s all going just to the elite school gang when I can see differently.</p>
<p>vicariousparent- That’s an interesting observation (about justifying choices) and probably true to a great extent. Don’t we all go through life trying to justify our choices?
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about our family’s decision to send WildChild to one of the elites at full-fare. That decision was made before the economy crashed, but wasn’t going to be easy anyway. Given the state of the economy and the job prospects for grads, I have really been examining our decision and have asked him the question “Was it worth it?” Some of you might recall that he hated his school so much freshman year that he briefly went AWOL. As a senior, he says it was worth it and he’s glad he is graduating from this college. He says he has met a lot of influential people, had some awesome professors (and some terrible ones) and “learned a lot about how things work in the world.” All that for a mere $52K a year! He has a job-a good one- for after graduation, and, frankly, the prestige of his school helped him land that job over a number of other good candidates. So- there is light at the end of the tunnel and he WILL be off our payroll shortly. If I were making the decision right now, in this economy, with a high school senior, I am not at all sure I would make the same choice or that I would tell another family “It’s worth it. Suck it up and pay the $52K for the elite school.” There are so many variables, which we’ve discussed month after month here on CC.</p>
<p>I agree with you pizzagirl, and I am also fortunately in the same boat as you. No debt. Full pay. Been to some rarefied places. Seen the benefits. Realize the limitations. There is no one formula for success that works for everyone. We all make our choices and our compromises.</p>
<p>MOWC: Thank you for sharing those thoughts. I think the best thing to do (at least try to do) is do what seems best at the time and then move on, without revisiting those decisions too much. Easier said than done. I still wonder what would have happened had I chosen option B instead of A about 25 years ago, or option Y instead of X 2 years ago :)</p>
<p>Thought this “Atlantic” article from 2004 was interesting and appropriate to this thread.</p>
<p>College Admissions 2004 October 2004 Atlantic
The pressure on smart kids to get into top schools has never been higher. But the differences between these schools and the next tier down have never been smaller
by Gregg Easterbrook </p>
<p>Who Needs Harvard?</p>
<p>Today almost everyone seems to assume that the critical moment in young people’s lives is finding out which colleges have accepted them. Winning admission to an elite school is imagined to be a golden passport to success; for bright students, failing to do so is seen as a major life setback. As a result, the fixation on getting into a super-selective college or university has never been greater. Parents’ expectations that their children will attend top schools have “risen substantially” in the past decade, says Jim Conroy, the head of college counseling at New Trier High School, in Winnetka, Illinois. He adds, “Parents regularly tell me, ‘I want whatever is highest-ranked.’” Shirley Levin, of Rockville, Maryland, who has worked as a college-admissions consultant for twenty-three years, concurs: “Never have stress levels for high school students been so high about where they get in, or about the idea that if you don’t get into a glamour college, your life is somehow ruined.”</p>
<p>The above post consists of exactly 3,725 words (per MS Word). WOW! And as a result it is both hopelessly unreadable and silly, in my opinion. If anyone disagrees, please assure me at the the outset of your post that you have indeed read the entire post. But also keep it short.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s hopelessly unreadable–and yes, I’ve read the entire post. It is, however, a violation of copyright law, being not merely an excerpt but the entire article.</p>
<p>Yep, read the whole thing, found it very worthwhile. Remember–it’s an article, not the blatherings that we CCers usually post! :)</p>
<p>Keil…you are mistaken. I didn’t edit my post (#84) after you wrote your post. I wrote my post at 12:13 pm. You wrote yours 20 minutes later at 12:33 (#85). </p>
<p>Not only did I not change my quote, I wouldn’t have been allowed to change my post after your post, since changes are only allowed for 20 minutes (plus there would have been an “edit time” under my post.). </p>
<p>Instead, you copied only a portion of my quote, which gave it a different meaning. I realize you didn’t intentionally do that.</p>
<p>^I have no clue what happened, then, because I copied your entire sentence using copy-paste. The computer doesn’t magically rephrase sentences.</p>
<p>EDIT: Never mind. I realized that you were citing a different issue than I was. “It doesn’t look like” is not a true qualifier because you’re still stating your opinion, which I corrected.</p>