For the most part this is not true. SAT and ACT prep classes don’t increase scores very much at all. Most schools waive application fees for poor students.
The biggest advantage non-poor kids have in getting into a better schools is the knowledge of which schools are goods and the encouragement to apply to the best schools.
Or as a French speaker would say, toute de suite.
BA+60 years of service? Is the retirement plan that bad?
My apologies. I noted that the quote tags were screwed up, but didn’t pay it enough attention.
BTW, there was a letter in the Times today from someone who claimed that athletic departments got a quota of admissions, and there was a similar quota for legacy admissions and donors admissions, so the regular student was not affected by the scandal (except perhaps in decreasing the reputation of the school.) Real athletes in minor sports were.
I’m not sure how true this is, but it seems plausible.
I’ve heard that getting into schools like the Ivy Leagues is the tough part and that the curriculum is ***not ***necessarily “punishingly tough” at all, especially if you major in something like liberal arts.
Credit hours, not years of service. Hopefully upper-division college coursework designed to update/enhance your teaching assignment. Although it can be gamed… 
We get step increases every couple of years until Year 29, when it caps. F29 is as high as you can go. I’m currently at E29+3, which is just fine. I never wanted to get the Masters anyway.
I imagine both.
I looked at his background in a Forbes article (his name is David Knopf ). His prior jobs included:
Goldman Sachs - investment banking - analyst
Onex - private equity - ??
3G Capital - private equity - Partner, involved in $45 billion Kraft Heinz merger
To me it looks like he started down a typical investment banking career path. His “big break” appears to have been his involvement in the Kraft Heinz merger. I don’t know if he was a partner before or after the merger, but presumably his skills impressed his client so much that they made him their CFO.
Certainly a smart guy, but also a bit of luck being in the right place at the right time.
Interesting article about where the Fortune 500 CEOs went to college:
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2018-06-11/top-fortune-500-ceos-where-they-went-to-college
Only 14 graduated from Ivy League undergrad schools.
“Only” 14/500 in Ivy League (2.8%) is high proportion compared to the proportion of Ivy Leaguers in the total population of college-educated people (based on current enrollment, about 0.5%)
Entrepreneurs make up a large portion of the modern Fortune 500 and generally are not terribly representative of the elite, although their kids might be. And where they got their graduate degree, if any, might tell you more.
I couldn’t find an equivalent listing for the Fortune 500 but this article, Here Is What It Takes to Become a CEO, According to 12,000 LinkedIn Profiles, has a broader picture.
The top ten universities attended include both undergraduate and graduate schools, most of which would definitely be called elite.
Fun fact, I have a degree, I list it on my resume, and I have had jobs where people asked about it. Only twice in a long working life have I gone for jobs that required me to* prove* I had a degree, and they were both real shit jobs (well I’m not sure about the one I didn’t get, but I have an inkling). One of them asked for a transcript and one of them, the shit one I got, wanted to see my diploma or a copy of it.
I also worked on my college newspaper and literary magazine, and I mentioned it, for the first couple of jobs I went after. Not since then. Had it been the Harvard Crimson or the Harvard Lampoon, I could have mentioned it forever and it would have meant something.
I have a friend who went to Antioch, which at the time was considered elite, in that it was pretty selective about who went there, and it had a great reputation. Now it’s gone. I have no idea how that works for my friend but it’s good that he had a couple of decades of experience before the college he went to folded up and disappeared.
It’s back. https://www.antiochcollege.edu
(technically it’s a “new” institution, but they’re trying to keep the brand alive. Mostly successfully, I think.)
But I know what you mean.
That touches on an interesting point. A lot of companies are started or run by executives who don’t come from elite schools. And yet, once the companies reach a certain level, all they seem to want to recruit from are the top schools. There’s a certain risk-averse logic to it. No one gets fired for hiring that guy from Wharton who didn’t work out.
According to the article, the main career highlights for a CEO are:
Computer science was the most popular field of study for CEOs
Stanford University was the most attended school among CEOs
Consultant was the most common first job (on record) for CEOs
Most CEOs were directors (for a while) before being promoted to the top job
There’s no single path to becoming a CEO
Not surprising that CEOs skew towards Stanford and Computer Science as I imagine a disproportionate number of startups are tech.
Other than that, the article isn’t particularly insightful. Starting a career as a consultant (i.e. Accenture, BCG, Capgemini, Deloitte, EY, FTI Consulting, Gartner, Huron, IBM, etc, etc) and becoming a “director” at some point in your career is such a common path as to be meaningless.
puddleglum writes:
> Most schools waive application fees for poor students.
For poor students. That’s something like a family of four which makes less than $45,000 per year. That’s about 35% of all families. The problem is the applicants who come from a family of four who makes between $45,000 and $75,000 per year. That’s about 20% of all families. They don’t quite make little enough to get waivers. The problem is that applying to a bunch of top colleges and taking the SAT and ACT tests could easily cost $600. Their parents are likely to say, “Hey, we didn’t even get to go to college. Why don’t you just apply to one state university and take just the SAT (or ACT, as appropriate) to get in there? Why do you want to cost us $600? Why do you think you deserve to go to some top college if we didn’t go to college at all?” Waiving the fees for truly poor students doesn’t work much better. The parents in those families often are a little suspicious about the idea of their kids going to college at all. Even if a college gives them enough financial aid to pay for all the tuition and room and board, there are other expenses. They think that if their kid really has to go to college, why don’t they go part-time to a community college and work at a job at the same time?
> SAT and ACT prep classes don’t increase scores very much at all.
The best SAT preparation courses raise the scores going from the PSAT to the SAT by about 115 points.
Good question, a Harvard MBA is pretty hard to get also the STEM areas are the same.
But there are a hell of a lot of degrees that don’t really offer much but hey with a trust fund you may not really need it…
One of my relatives is a specialty surgeon, my nephew tells me this guy made a $500,000 signing bonus when he went to his new job. His daughter went to a very prestigious women’s college on a scholarship as an independent student, as she was not living or communicating with him or her mother. YMMV
Some practice with the sort of test questions they tend to ask on these exams like SAT goes a long way to showing students the pattern of what they can expect to see. That beats facing it cold. If there’s a good match with the sort of questions that really appear on the test - sort of demonstrating the psychology of the test writers - that helps too. Of course, nothing beats having deep interest and background in reading (more than a screenful at time, that is) and an expansive vocabulary that comes with voracious reading.
It is important to distinguish in a claim like yours between expensive personal coaching or classes vs. what your link actually recommends
which is the free online Khan Academy.
Expensive prep courses don’t outperform good ol’ practice, practice, practice.
The older studies about prep not working apply to a completely different version of the test. The current SAT is explicitly designed to respond well to coaching/practice/prep. It is a explicitly a test of skills, not aptitude.
A prep coach or class is all about making you practice, practice, practice in the most effective way. It’s not about getting magical advice, it’s about taking practice tests and having someone go over them with you.
There are parents who think like this?
Hell yes. Quite a few in my neighborhood which is hardly poor. I know a family where both parents had good jobs - who thought a new car was a much better investment than college for their kids. One of the college counselors at the high school was convinced that the CSU up the freeway was as good as Harvard.
There are lots of parents out there who seem to want to torpedo their kids chances.
I thought I’d revisit this part of the original post.
There are plenty of reports that an Ivy League education is (for some people) easier than HS was.
Some elite schools have punishingly tough curricula.
Other elite schools require a punishingly tough HS curricula, then try to give you the most expensive education money can buy.