I didn’t go myself, so I’m unclear on the finer points—
At first I didn’t understand why the parents of these affluent mediocre students were so desperate to get their kids admitted to topflight universities; where surely the curricula were punishingly tough. After all, if the kid can’t pass the SATs or whatever, how the hell do they expect them to ever be able to handle the actual schoolwork?
But then when I heard that Trumpf’s college grades were sealed, it occurred to me that all you have to do is sail by with a C- average, and you still get a shingle! Your grades are sealed, and no one will ever know whether you learned anything, retained it at all, whether you passed with flying colors or were just some knucklehead who barely scraped by. It’s the same degree. I mean, you could graduate summa cum laude or what have you. But basically, a degree is no indication at all that you are more than minimally competent, and your grades are sealed so no one will ever know.
Grades can be known if the student gives them to whomever. For example, you need transcripts in order to go to a different university or to grad school. A lot of American colleges have some sort of honor rolls and those are public, so even without knowing the actual grades we can know whether someone made the Dean’s List or graduated Summa Cum Laude.
But yeah, there is a lot of flexibility on what one can “get away with”. A friend of mine got his first after-college job at a company which designed game consoles: his employment conditions included 2 hours of math tutoring every day, as he’d managed to finagle an Electronic Engineering degree without a single credit beyond Algebra 101; another one was having problems as a Junior deciding whether she wanted to declare (that is, make her major) Psychology or Computer Science, because she had about as many credits for each of them but not enough total credits for a double major… Some American universities offer a Bachelor’s in General Studies, which fulfills the requirements for any of the multitude of jobs which require “a Bachelor’s degree”.
They would normally study a non serious degree like woman’s studies or arts etc. The reason they want to go to that college is all about getting a stamp on their forehead that they belong.
Oh…I think I get it. Because you will rub elbows with All The Best People and acquire useful contacts for later life.
But what does that say about the actual quality of the education? I always thought it was part and parcel of going to one of these Ivy League colleges that a graduate could at least be relied upon to have a superior, cutting-edge, exemplary education.
I guess that’s simply not necessarily true. Perhaps people are actually getting better educations at the less glamorous institutions. Where prestige is simply not a polluting factor. After all, amazingly enough, many employers like to see actual skills.
When I applied for my first job after college, several hundred years ago, employers would always require a college transcript as part of the application process. The way transcripts work is you, the graduate, requests a transcript from your college, and the college then sends the transcript directly to the employer (or sometimes they send it to you in a sealed envelope which you give to the employer). The transcript is a record of all the courses you took and what your grades were. So the employer can tell whether you were a superstar or just barely squeaked by.
No. All “sealed records” (mandated by FERPA in the US) means is that a school cannot provide information on students to third parties unless authorized by the student, as it should be. Nothing stops employers or anyone else from asking the student to furnish records. Capable students applying for their first jobs will also distinguish themselves by taking internships, performing undergraduate research, or any number of other extracurricular opportunities to build their skills. Employers look for all of these in their applicants. If a job merely requires the applicant to have a college degree in any field, then it is likely management is looking for someone at least minimally capable of handling a structured environment and are not interested in specific technical skills.
The Ivy league attracts top students out of high school so you would expect a lot of very well educated people to graduate from them. It’s hard to say if they provide a better education or just have more of the better students. But what you mention is true, you do get connections with influential people and you have an edge in the competition for jobs because of the image.
I worked for a company where the owner was an MIT grad and loved hiring other MIT grads. But it hasn’t turned out quite the way he thought, the VP I worked for was proud to say he had fired more MIT grads than anyone else. Our best people came from both the top schools and other pretty good schools. And occasionally some of them came from less prestigious backgrounds, including one weird guy who wasn’t even a college grad.
I’ve never had a job where anyone asked for a college transcript. Hell, they don’t even bother to check out if you actually got a degree; they take your word for it (don’t try this, though: if they find out, you’re fired).
There are plenty of courses in even the tough schools that can be passed if you work at it. Once you get the degree, that stamps your a legitimate. So all someone has to do is muddle through and get the credits you need. You do make contacts and sometimes the school does matter when hiring decisions are made.
Universities are well aware of this and people do get caught. Anti-cheating policies range from requiring students to show their photo ID prior to turning in a test (to prevent paid substitutes) to requiring papers to be processed through a comparison service (like TurnItIn) to detect plagiarism. Student evaluation, in general, is done department-by-department, and faculty are generally aware of who is enrolled in their classes and their overall performance.
The idea of someone paying a substitute student to stand in for their entire college career is basically movie fiction.
My understanding is that nobody flunks out of an Ivy League school. Once you’re in, they get you through. And a lot of the advantages of those schools is not the degree per se but the contacts you make to join the “old boy” network. So the grades aren’t that important, unless you interview for your first job with an employer that hasn’t already been asked by Daddy to a favor and hire you.
Apparently it’s rare, but people do flunk out of Ivy League schools. Perhaps 2% of them do. Perhaps about 10% who enter don’t graduate. Incidentally, talking as if Ivy League schools are the only very selective American universities is deceptive. Ivy League is not a term for all very selective colleges. It’s a name for a group (which now means just an athletic conference) of eight old, very selective colleges. There are quite a few American colleges besides those eight which are also very selective:
There are some minor (but reasonable) misconceptions here that I might be able to clear up:
The Ivy League, while immensely prestigious, is not the be-all, end-all of American higher education. Motivated students get a much better education at non-flagship state schools than slackers do at Harvard. When it comes to education (like so much else) you get out of it what you put into it. An Ivy League education can be excellent, but so can a basic state school education.
The social/class benefits of attending an Ivy League school are substantial, but the American aspirational upper middle class—basically, people like those caught in this cheating scandal—overestimates those benefits (IMHO). It’s not that the people you rub elbows with are The Best People…it’s that you’ll know people who end up being powerful later in life. Also, context matters. Being among high achievers raises the bar, so someone who would slack anywhere will slack a little less at an Ivy League school (maybe). But the point is not so much that you learn which fork to use at a fancy restaurant—it’s that you’re comfortable with “fancy” circumstances. This is valuable but it’s also not an indication of personal goodness or achievement.
You can totally flunk out of an Ivy League school. Cookingwithgas, I’m not sure where you got that idea, but it’s mostly not true. I say “mostly” because there are cases (and there will continue to be cases) where people were not flunked out even though they should have been because they have influential parents. But the average student will totally flunk out if they don’t go to class and don’t take exams.
It seems to me that lots of people think one of two things about the Ivy League: some people imagine that Harvard is the intellectual equivalent of the Navy SEAL selection process, while others think it’s basically a spa. It’s neither. A handful of students at Harvard slack off and fail. More students slack off and pass with Cs. Most students do fine but don’t set the world on fire. And, yeah, some students distinguish themselves. Ivy League schools aren’t country clubs, but they’re also not ruthlessly screening for only the very best at every waking moment.
If you go to grad school, your undergrad institution doesn’t matter much. What’s more, the people who decide who gets into grad school don’t have the same ideas about the Ivies that your typical helicopter parent does. My ex runs one of the best social-sciences programs in the country…she’s a first-generation college student, and she cares a lot more about an applicant’s fire in the belly than she does about the name of their undergrad institution.
Cheating is generally not tolerated for three reasons: 1) it’s cheating. Duh. 2) Cheating harms the brand. 3) Most of the professors and graduate teaching assistants (TAs) didn’t cheat when they were undergrads, and they have very little tolerance for people who try to bend the rules this way. When I was a TA in grad school (at a flagship land-grant university) I caught a set of five plagiarists the old-fashioned way: as I read the second paper in the group, it occurred to me that I had read it before. Plus, as others have mentioned, TurnItIn.com and other services are actually making it harder to cheat that it was, say, 30 years ago.
Yeah, an Ivy League education is great for networking. IMHO, lots of upper-middle-class white people conflate networking with quality education or success. But it’s not like a first-class lounge at an airport where, once you’re in, life is all peaches and cream. It’s often hard, and yes, you can fail. In some ways, struggling students really do have a little more of a safety net than other schools.
But it’s not a panacea. Plenty of screw-ups flunked out of Ivy League schools or graduated and proceeded to do nothing remotely interesting. My ex, as I’ve said, was the first in her family to go to college, attending a good small liberal arts school. Now she’s a fancy full professor running the top program in the country (in her field). Attending an Ivy League school doesn’t hurt, but it’s not a golden ticket either.
And I don’t fault anyone who thinks it might be a golden ticket…it’s certainly sold that way—maybe not by the schools themselves, but definitely by the test-prep and resume-polishing industries.
This is a great point (among other great points in that post). Here are a few schools that are highly selective and roughly as prestigious (to those in the know) as Ivy League schools:
Pomona
Haverford
Smith (and all of the Seven Sisters)
Deep Springs
Macalester
William and Mary (actually a state school)
Oberlin
The Colorado College
The New School
Sarah Lawrence
Berkeley
While plenty of hiring managers who graduated from state schools might not know enough about Sarah Lawrence to be impressed, many hiring managers who attended Columbia would understand a Sarah Lawrence graduate to be very well educated. It’s all about connections, but there’s more than one way to make them.
Well…not really. I mean, I can’t speak for the medical profession, but just because you graduate with a degree in law, engineering or accounting doesn’t mean you’ll get hired by a law, engineering or accounting firm.
The way college “works” is that there are various colleges that are widely regarded with various levels of prestige and selectiveness. i.e. Harvard, Princeton and Yale typically regarded as the top 3, schools like Boston College, NYU, Cornell recognized as “really good schools”, state schools like Rutgers and UConn considered “solid educations” and so on.
While attending school, you pick a major that may or may not have anything to do with what sort of career you pursue after graduation.
Unlike applying to college which is largely guided by standardized scores like the SAT and your high school grades, landing a job after graduation (or at least the job you want), is more ambiguous and largely dependent on several factors:
-The prestige of the school, which often drives the companies and industries that hire there.
-Academics - grades, deans list, honor societies
-Your major and whether it is relevant or required for the position
-Extra-curriculars. Particularly ones showing leadership
-Any summer internships you held
-Geography
-Network connections
-Your interviewing skills / ability to connect with the interviewer
I suspect the finance program at Harvard isn’t really much different from that of Boston College. But the students at Harvard are largely assumed to be of higher caliber because the school is more selective.
Similarly, outside of the Ivy League, you also have the Patriot League (where I graduated from), which is also an athletic conference. Wikipedia describes these schools as “Outside the Ivy League, it is among the most selective group of higher education institutions”
-American University
-West Point
-Boston University
-Bucknell
-Colgate
-Holy Cross
-Lehigh
-Lafayette
-Loyola
-Annapolis
Again, mostly old, prestigious private colleges. Perhaps not the instant “wow” factor of Harvard or Stanford. But students from these schools tend to be smart and achieve relatively high levels of success.