Let’s note that not all the schools in the admissions scandal were topflight schools. Several of the students got into USC, for example. It’s not considered one of the best schools. It’s good, but not elite. The reason they went there is because that school has a certain cache among some young people, especially kids of actors. There’s a reason it’s sometimes known as University of Spoiled Children. Most of the other schools were also not topflight.
The U.S. is spoiled rotten with good colleges. Most countries have maybe half a dozen really top flight schools. The U.S. has a couple of dozen and probably a hundred more who are very good overall but have certain departments and specialties that are equal to anyone. There’s a book called the Hidden Ivies that discusses 63 schools “to create greater awareness of the small, distinctive cluster of colleges and universities of excellence that are available to gifted college-bound students.” These are private colleges, but there is a similar concept called the public ivies.
Getting a really good education is possible at any of these schools. Being guaranteed a really good education is something different. Elite colleges need to live up to their reputations. They have to spend their money on the best professors, the biggest libraries, the most up-to-date labs. An elite college will generally be elite in dozens of programs. A very good college may be elite in a dozen. A good college may only compete in a handful. Harvard offers a degree in Statistics. Is that an elite program? I have no idea. It’s probably very good but equally probably other schools have Statistics departments of equal worth. The point is that your odds at Harvard are good even if you throw a date at the degree list, and that’s not as likely to be true for non-elite universities.
Most of this discussion is made completely moot by the basic fact that the eliteness of a university’s education is about 99% determined by their graduate schools, not their undergraduate degrees. Harvard’s graduate degrees are hard to get into and hard to get through. No “gentleman’s C’s” there. And they have 14 graduate schools, from Business to Public Health. That’s where Harvard shines. And none of the people getting in through bribes are going to any of them.
Here’s some lists of very selective American colleges:
Note that there’s no dividing line between the most selective colleges and non-selective colleges. There’s just a spectrum from the most selective to the least selective. There’s no way that a good high school student should say to himself, “Well, I didn’t get into one of the top X colleges that are worth going to, so my life is over.” For all that student knows, the (X+1)-th most selective college will accept them. What I remember from books about applying to colleges that I read years ago, a student should apply to a spectrum of colleges from one that there is a bare chance that they could get into to one that they are certain to get into. The books recommended applying to half a dozen colleges. Today I hear about students who apply to twenty colleges.
In any case, if you go to a community college and get a 4.0, go to the top public university in your state for the last two years and get a 4.0, go to a top graduate (or professional) school and get a 4.0 and some publications and good recommendations from professors, you’re in just a good shape to get a good job as someone who spends their entire time in very selective college and graduate (or professional) schools who gets the same grades, publications, and recommendations at that graduate (or professional) school. Your life is not ruined by going to some place other than a very selective college immediately after high school. You’ll be judged by how well you do at the end of your education, not at the beginning. An employer is not going to look at two people whose accomplishments in graduate (or professional) school are equally good and say, “Well, these two people are both brilliant and their grades, publications, and recommendations show it, but one of them went to community college. We can just kick that person to the curb. Maybe they can flip hamburgers at McDonalds. We’ll give our fantastically well-paying job to someone who went to a very selective college immediately after college.”
Look at it this way.
Why is it that many Americans think Notre Dame and Miami are great schools, while pretty much no foreigner does?
Because we tend to think that “stuff I have heard of but don’t associate with something horrible” has to be not just famous, but good. And what makes those two famous is American football.
A school that’s superb at a certain type of studies may be not-so-good or even bad for some other offerings, but in the case of these particular families, many if not all of the parents weren’t looking for “good teaching” so much as, yep, good contacts. And as several other posters have mentioned, a school you’ve never heard of until you start researching a particular course of study (it doesn’t have a good sports program or get namedropped in movies) may turn out to be superb at that stuff you’re interested in: people who know what is it they’re interested in may end up having as their first choice a school which isn’t in the list these parents were looking for.
That is a very odd list. Berkeley is hardly an obscure university. The Silicon Valley parents near me drive their kids to it, as much as Stanford. My wife went to William and Mary and while it is an excellent school, it is not anywhere near Harvard except being older if you look at it the right way.
It is true that a motivated student at a good school could do better than a slacker at Harvard - maybe. A slacker at the good school will not do better. I say maybe because Harvard has significant grade inflation, and because there is an assumption that anyone making it into an elite school is in the club. I know people at MIT who screwed up royally and still made it through.
Besides contacts made at school you also can make good contacts at the alumni organization. I was heavily involved in the MIT club in Princeton, and I got to know some famous and powerful people really well. You can also get involved with famous professors in your field in these places.
And there is the job situation. My company, a Fortune 50 one, did not look at resumes outside a reasonably small group of elite schools. There were exceptions if you cleared it with a very high level HR person. I managed to do so once, but I also got a resume rejected from a good but not top school. Recruiters don’t go everywhere - you are going to see a lot more at an elite school.
Our rule for our kids was that they should go to the best school they could get into - legitimately - and which they wanted to go to. Worked very well.
Voyager, please note that I wrote only the first three lines of what you are quoting. msmith537 wrote the rest of it. msmith537 quoted a little bit of one of my posts. Be careful when you quote a post that contains a long quote from someone else. I do not wish to be associated with anything I did not write, even if it’s a reasonable good post.
Yeah. And I believed, til a few days ago that you got into a prestigious University by your works. Not because Mommy/Hollywood star paid your way in.
Adding, I have a college student. She worked very hard to earn her full ride to her Uni.
It makes me sick to think of some Ms.Money bags Mommy showing and buying her kid a spot and possibly shutting out my student.
Yeah, at the consulting firm I used to work at, I was giving my 28 year old senior associate a hard time because one of his classmates at Princeton was recently hired as CFO of Fortune 500 company Kraft Heinz.
That’s more an exception that the rule IMHO. At 28, I would expect even an Ivy League grad to be working as maybe a manager or “VP” (typically the first level of “management” at an investment bank) at a consulting firm or investment bank. I have a number of classmates who achieved top positions at major companies, but they did so in their 40s.
You’re thinking about it from the perspective of learning a trade so someone will hire you to perform specific tasks. Like a plumber or HVAC technician. That’s not really the purpose of college, particularly as you go to the more prestigious schools. Yes, there are certain degrees like engineering, accounting, finance and so on where you are learning specific subject matter expertise related to your profession. But the main purpose of higher education at the more prestigious schools is to teach you how to think creatively and be a leader.
Think of it this way. You can probably learn how to be a competent accountant from going to community college or even taking a bunch of inexpensive Udemy courses online. The goal of a top education is to prepare you to be the sort of leader who can eventually run a multi-billion dollar professional services firm like Deloitte or EY in an age of constant technology, economic, political and regulatory change.
The employment benefits of a prestigious school are very limited if all you have is the degree. In addition to informal networking (which is a little over-rated, IMO), elite schools offer pretty amazing future career support, starting day 1.
First, there’s a lot of on-campus opportunities to do things that can get your foot in the door at a company–research in real labs, sophisticated productions, entrepreneur clubs, etc. One of the distinctive features of elite schools is that they recruit lots of go-getters. A critical mass of “go-getters” makes it much easier to find other dedicated people who want to make a movie, write a video game, etc. You can start building a portfolio.
Then, there’s the internships. This is like a whole different world. Everyone from top companies to area start-ups competes for the kids from the elites. I feel like all the kids I send to “elite” schools ends up with residential internships (where they fly you to some city, put you in company housing, and pay you a 5-figure stipend). They end up at Google, Facebook, investment banks–all kinds of places. My kids at state schools have to compete like hell for a much smaller pool.
Finally, there’s the industry recruiting at the end. Interviews start early your senior year–like October–and you just have access to a pipeline that doesn’t exist at other schools.
Now, in all of this (even the clubs, in some cases!) your grades and general academic performance will be evaluated. And by people that KNOW your school and program intimately, so you can’t BS this part. They know what organizations exist, what grades your classmates get, what opportunities you’ve had, etc. etc., so your performance really does matter. If you’ve just coasted through these last years, you’re not going to do great, and you may well have to actually go looking for a job in the same pool as “regular” college grads.
So yes, grades and performance at an “elite” school has a dramatic influence on your post-graduation success.
There’s a threadabout “what counts as elite?” that’s active right now in IMHO. I’ve talked everyone’s ear off there, so I won’t repeat it here.
Beckdawrek, if it’s true that you “believed, til a few days ago that you got into a prestigious University by your works”, then you don’t know the ways that rich and reasonably well-off students get into top colleges easier than those from less well-off families. Parents have gotten students into top colleges by donating lots of money to the colleges. Reasonably well-off parents help get students into top colleges by paying for SAT and ACT preparation courses and college-essay writing coaches. Middle-class parents buy SAT and ACT preparation books and books about choosing a top college for their child and have enough money to allow the student to apply to a number of top colleges and are willing to encourage their child to apply to them. Parents from economic levels below that haven’t gone to college themselves and generally can’t tell their child anything about applying to top colleges. They barely understand how to apply to community colleges. They do’t know anything about the SAT and ACT tests. The poorer the parents are, the less chance the student has of getting into a top college, no matter how smart they are, just because they don’t know about these legal ways of improving their chances, some of which cost considerable money. The news stories recently have been just about the illegal ways that parents improve their child’s chances.
We call them “vocational” degrees. Nursing, medicine, law, computing, several branches of engineering, etc are all degrees that prepare you directly for a job.
I believe now “trades” go by “CTE,” (which was part of the language in the most recent Carl Perkins renewal), while MD, law, engineering, go by “professional.” Nursing is sometimes considered CTE (especially LVN), but I’ve seen it qualified as a distinct kind of CTE at some institutions.
Like most things in life, you get out of college exactly what you put in to it.
Another way to distinguish them is as a “Liberal Arts” or “Applied Science”.
Never been true. The modern university is a product of the late 19th century, when American colleges, starting with Johns Hopkins, started imitating German universities. Before then most colleges were intended to turn out ministers or teachers or farmers (the A&M land grant schools). Germany was the global home of science and Americans saw that as the necessary future.
Only a small number of schools put real effort into modernization. Those became what we now think of as the elite schools. Their focus, as I said earlier, lay in making their Ph.D. programs equal to those of other countries. Spreading this attitude to professional schools started in the early 20th century, when major medical, law, business, journalism, and other specialized disciplines sprouted schools.
This aura gave a glow to the undergraduate colleges associated with the graduate schools. The well-to-do and powerful sent their kids there for prestige and networking. An education was secondary. (The Ivy League got its nickname probably in the thirties - for sports. The formal Ivy League conference started in 1954.) Because alumni were pursued for donations, schools actively sought their kids and gave them preference for admission. They were known as legacies.
Until a couple of decades after WWII, probably 90% of the elite college student bodies were there because their parents could afford it, many of them legacies, with the remaining 10% the true students who scraped and clawed to get in. (Remember that until the GI Bill, only 5-10% of Americans went to college, much less grad school.) That changed with the flood of baby boomer kids, the rise of standardized testing, the removal of quotas against Jews and minorities, and the sense of being in an intellectual world war with the Soviets.
Today more than half of American kids attend some kind of college. That was never the intent of these schools. True, the sheer numbers mean that many more schools have been forced to get better to compete and that good educations are available everywhere in the country. But it also means that the competition to get into a name that might give an edge later is that much fiercer.
The main purpose of higher and lower education should simply be developing the skills to think logically and creatively, and to continue to learn throughout life. If I had a nickel for every student who went to school for that reason last year I would have twice as many nickels as you could find under my couch cushions right now.
Interesting thread…
Miami is considered a better university? Obviously something I’d never heard before.
Somebody who becomes a CFO of any company at 28 is pretty special - either very good at their job or also very good at office politics.
I went to a job fair many many years ago when I was graduating college, and someone at the Q&A asked a local executive for Exxon (Esso Canada) how important marks were. He mentioned they’d done an informal survey of the ivory tower, and none of the top executives had notably high marks. What lets you succeed, especially in management, is other skills. Marks get you in the door of your first job. The presumption is that a good uni means you were pretty smart to get in in the first place, and that the “better” institutions are less likely to resort to grade inflation (or need to). But few years later, just having a degree is sufficient. You will be judged on your work history.
There’s the joke that “why is university faculty politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so small.” I imagine that the whole faculty knows which students need to be coddled. Not sure I went to large government-run university (UofT) so it’s not like they had a giant endowment fund or cohort of prestigious alumni to satisfy. I imagine it’s different in Ivy schools.
But this scandal is different. It did not involve the school administrations, it was upper middle class types bribing front-line officials to make smooth the road of their little messiahs. I doubt anyone in the college faculties is privy to the need to coddle these students. I should point out - I went to private school, then to university. I never met actual STUPID people, mentally challenged, until I dropped out and took a blue collar job for a while. You don’t know stupid until you’ve met some. Presumably these students are not completely brick-shy-of-a-load stupid, they’ve had an interesting upbringing and good nutrition. While a STEM degree may require some grounding in basics of math and science, presumably some facility with language and life will suffice to eke out a C in arts degrees, especially if you latch onto (suck up to) a sympathetic professor. So I would imagine most of those who can compose a good video blog can write a decent essay, and then hire someone to teach them to polish it with footnotes and punctuation. I.e. they’re not as dumb as they look.
In my field that is totally true. Teachers get paid based on years of service and credit hours post-BA. In my district, the columns look like: BA (rare, only for special cases), BA +15, BA+30, BA+45(or Masters), BA+60(or Masters+15), Masters+30.
Anecdote: A few decades back, one of my fellow teachers was playfully ragging on me for graduating from a CalState school. He felt superior because his degree was from Georgetown. I noted that we were both teaching at the same school for the same pay, and I just didn’t see the edge. Shut that issue down toot sweet*.
Or as a Georgetown grad would say - tuit de suite. 