Maybe they do, but this whole discussion is missing the point that going to an "elite" university is not an essential step in having a successful life and career. I quoted a bunch of this data in a previous thread that I'm too lazy to search for right now, but the gist is, you have approximately as good a chance of becoming CEO of an S&P 500 company if you go to the University of Wisconsin as if you go to Harvard. So even if your goals are at the extreme upper end of the spectrum, you aren't necessarily hurt by not going to an Ivy League school. A well known, well regarded State university puts you on pretty good footing as well.
None of this, of course, is meant to say that discrimination is good, or that I encourage it or anything like that. Personally, I think admissions should be completely race-blind. I'm just saying there's a bigger picture that we should look at as well. If you don't get into Stanford, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard or wherever, fine... go to Georgia Tech, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Clemson, University of California at Irvine, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Texas, Pitt, Penn State, Miami, etc., etc., etc. You'll most likely do just fine.
Heck, as far as that goes, there are some public, State universities that are probably as well regarded as some Ivy's, at least in some people's eyes. Look at UCal-Berkely. They are one of the most famous, well known, and well regarded schools in the frickin' world. Or how about UIUC? Not exactly a shabby reputation there. Or UM-College Park? You could do worse...
I think you confuse the odds of a given exec being from Harvard vs. OSU with the odds that a Harvard student becomes an exec vs. that an OSU grad becomes an exec.
All things equal, if you want to be a leader (especially in finance), going to Harvard is a better choice than Ohio State.
In retrospect, you may be right, when factoring in the different size of the student populations. But nonetheless, I stand by the point that going to a good State school is a perfectly sufficient step to have a good - even amazing - career. Keep in mind that there are only, well, 500, S&P 500 CEOs. But a pretty damn successful and amazing career might be being the CEO of a multi-million dollar textile manufacturer in South Carolina, that nobody on HN has ever heard of.
Of course I'm not arguing against aspiring to go to an Ivy if you have that chance. But one should absolutely not define their life by whether they get into an Ivy (or other "elite" ) school or not. Your ultimate success is going to, IMO, have more to do with how hard you work, and other characteristics, than the name on your degree.
This is independent of school -- if someone like Steve Jobs didn't go to college for very long, he'd be fine (oh wait, he was).
I'm involved with Thiel Foundation/20 Under 20; I think in a few years, it's possible that at the top end, it's not going to be as key to go to college. However, as that happens, the value of going to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, CMU, Caltech seems to be going up, relatively. It actually seems to be that the value of going to the next batch (other Ivies, Berkeley, UW^2, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, etc.) is going down, and the ones blow that is falling through the floor. Sort of the same thing that's happening to the economy as a whole -- the top 1% is doing exceptionally well, the next 4-9% is doing better, and the rest is falling apart.
There's that payscale list of best ROI per college which mostly confirms this, but there are some colleges in the top 20 I wouldn't have thought of (Duke, Babson, Harvey Mudd).
Means or even medians are probably not terribly useful (Stanford and Harvard should be crushing the stats just based on Google/Facebook/etc.). A school which has a lot of people who go into public service or other low compensation positions would also be unfairly penalized.
"Percentage of graduates who live the life they want after graduation" is probably the ideal metric, along with "net benefit to society".
On a pure ROI basis, it's obviously going to go to the service academies and maybe Olin/Cooper Union, too. Good incomes on zero cost.
But all of this also discounts the inputs; I'd consider a school which turns a bunch of otherwise-losers into median success citizens to be a success, while someplace which takes the children of Googlers and achieves the same result would be a horrible failure.
Yeah, I saw that :( And I think Olin may have changed their policy a few years ago (I'm not sure); seems to have tuition now, and a half scholarship for everyone.
I think the proper tuition is something where a student can work during the year and summers to pay for it and emerge with little or no debt, or choose to do non-work activities and have debt which could be repaid with 10-20% of reasonable income in 10 years. I'm not sure if half of inflated tuition covers that.
I don't know... their data either has to lag calendar time substantially, or be heavily based on inference or other statistical techniques that might not reflect reality. It may be accurate as a snapshot of a "point in time" but I'd be reluctant to judge any trends based on that, right now.
Let's go the extreme upper end: POTUS. Out of the last 10 presidents, 6 have attended Ivy League Schools (or 4 of the last 4 if you will). Sounds like pretty good odds to me.
I agree that where you went to school shouldn't matter for your career outcomes, but fact of the matter is that it simply does. There are plenty of people who hire ivyleague only
Let's go the extreme upper end: POTUS. Out of the last 10 presidents, 6 have attended Ivy League Schools (or 4 of the last 4 if you will). Sounds like pretty good odds to me.
Sounds irrelevant to me. Most people don't have "becoming President" as their goal. For the handful who do, then OK, sell your soul to try and get into an Ivy. But I would posit that this is an irrelevant point to most normal people. :-)
Exactly. That's basically my point... even at the extreme upper end of the ambition range, you can succeed without necessarily attending an Ivy League or "elite" university. Now, stop and look at the ambitions of the more average people, who maybe want to run a local Subway franchise in their hometown, or maybe be a VP of Engineering or VP of Marketing somewhere, or who would be satisfied being CEO of some obscure tool & die manufacturing plant in the Rust Belt, or who want to own a chain of Ford dealerships in their area. All of those things still count as "success" in most books, and I don't think any of them necessitate having gone to an Ivy League school.
Nö One says anything about it being necessary, but if you think that going to one of the "elite" universities doesn't help you tremendously with your chances of being higher up on your career ladder, then this is really not worth discussing.
In that light, you don't need anything, not a college degree, not a high school degree, because you will always be able to achieve success ...
but if you think that going to one of the "elite" universities doesn't help you tremendously with your chances of being higher up on your career ladder
Depends on how exactly you define "elite", "tremendously" and "career ladder".
Anyway, I'm not arguing that they don't help, I'm arguing that the extent of the difference they make is very possibly overstated, especially for people whose aspirations don't include "being President of the USA" or "being CEO of an S&P 500 company".
In that light, you don't need anything, not a college degree, not a high school degree, because you will always be able to achieve success
Not sure if that was meant to be sarcasm or mean to be taken literally, but I actually believe that very strongly. There are lots of variables that affect what happens to a person in life, of which "what university you attend" or "did you attend university at all" are just two.
Personally, I believe determination, ambition, perseverance, work ethic, attitude, etc., matter more than either of those factors.
I mean i agree that there are many factors at work, but im not sure whether i could comfortably say for example that "what university you attend" is a worse factor (correlation wise) than work ethic/determination. Though I guess that is party because you can't really measure those other factors you mentioned.
If you do the math, you'll see that an elite school's degree really will help you get into those midrange jobs. It opens doors, so if you have the ambition, it'll give you more opportunities.
Me, I'm kind of a bum, but thanks to my UC Berkeley degree, I barely have to make an effort to land a middle class job. Granted, I am a computer geek, so that's easy.
But also see the comment above. I am probably somewhat misinterpreting the data in the strict sense, in what I said above. About as many S&P 500 CEOs come from UW as from Harvard, but you have to consider student body size, so it's not quite the same thing. But I don't think this invalidates the general gist of what I'm saying, which is that you can go to a good State school and still expect to have a fine career.
There is a small subset of undergraduate students that go to public universities who are hidden high achievers with a very strong interest in an area of study. In this sense, they evaluate a college the way a potential PhD student would look at graduate programs - they are more concerned about the department ranking and research activity. If this were the case, a student might very well prefer UW, Berkeley, or UMich over Harvard, especially in a field like CS.
From this angle, it shouldn't be too surprising that this sort of student student would be as likely to come from UW as from Harvard. There's no real point in averaging in a huge student body drawn largely from a single state vs a small undergraduate student body with no in-state percentage requirements, because these students are unlike the other students at either institution. While it's harder to "get in" to harvard as an undergraduate, let's face it - the vast majority of students at either institution are probably not among the very brightest of the very brightest. Those statistical oddities are a small sliver, and I actually suspect that they can be difficult to detect through test scores and GPAs earned from age 15-17. These students often just don't give enough of a crap, or they may be far too focused on their intellectual interests to put enough time into the GPA game.
If UW has a strong CS department, it makes just as much sense that these odd outliers would come from there as an ivy.
Obviously the school you attend doesn't determine your future, but it matters. Harvard is better than UW and any other state school. You could share whatever stats you want, but Harvard is better, and using racism (lets call race-based discrimination what it really is) to limit a race's access to a better school is not something that misinterpreting CEO stats will ease.
Obviously the school you attend doesn't determine your future, but it matters. Harvard is better than UW and any other state school. You could share whatever stats you want, but Harvard is better
Maybe it is, but quantify that. And compare the best care outcomes from attending Harvard with people's actual ambitions. For most people, I still contend that going to Harvard (or not) is fairly irrelevant.
and using racism (lets call race-based discrimination what it really is) to limit a race's access to a better school is not something that misinterpreting CEO stats will ease.
Again, just to be clear, I am not trying to support racism or any sort of discrimination. I think admissions should be strictly race-blind, gender-blind, ethnicity-blind, religion-blind, etc. I'm just pointing out that if you get excluded from your $IVY_OF_CHOICE for whatever reason, you aren't consigned to the scrap heap of life. It's not the end of the world, and it's probably not even a big deal for most people. Now if you absolutely, 110% have your heart set on getting elected President someday, then I guess all bets are off.
"Harvard is better than UW and any other state school."
Well, I can't let that statement go by without challenging it. At the PhD level, I just don't agree that Harvard is better than UC Berkeley overall. It's pretty close, but I think UCB has slightly greater breadth and depth at the PhD level.
Like I said in an earlier comment, there is a type of very high achieving undergraduate who looks at and engages with a university more the way a grad student would. There are plenty of reasons someone like this might choose UCB or UMich over an ivy league school.
> Ouch. That hurts. First in the list of "2nd class" ;)
Given the context of what I'm arguing, I don't think you should feel too bad about that! Heck, I don't even mention my school in these discussions (UNC - Wilmington). Then again, I didn't bother graduating anyway.
None of this, of course, is meant to say that discrimination is good, or that I encourage it or anything like that. Personally, I think admissions should be completely race-blind. I'm just saying there's a bigger picture that we should look at as well. If you don't get into Stanford, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard or wherever, fine... go to Georgia Tech, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Clemson, University of California at Irvine, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Texas, Pitt, Penn State, Miami, etc., etc., etc. You'll most likely do just fine.
Heck, as far as that goes, there are some public, State universities that are probably as well regarded as some Ivy's, at least in some people's eyes. Look at UCal-Berkely. They are one of the most famous, well known, and well regarded schools in the frickin' world. Or how about UIUC? Not exactly a shabby reputation there. Or UM-College Park? You could do worse...