Entirely depends on your field, and “high standard of living” IN NO WAY equates with “happiness.” Not even on the most superficial level. As mentioned, for 99.99% of us, school is irrelevant, and I find that most of the people who hold up where they went to school as some sort of statement to be total assholes.
I graduated from a state college and teach at a public high school. One of my collegues used to playfully harrass me about my academic pedigree, since he graduated from Georgetown. I finally just said “And look where we’re both working. Frankly, I’m not seeing an edge.”
Are we talking about college as a way to get a piece of paper with the letters “B.A.” (or “B.S.” or whatever) on it, or as a way to get an education?
In the case of the latter, at least, it definitely matters. But it’s not just a matter of going to a “good school,” but of going to a school that’s a good match for you, and your needs and interests and personality and career goals.
There are a lot of variables as to if it “matters.” If you get your undergrad degree from “small state school” but get great grades and get into grad school at a great school. If your only source of contacts and networking is college, or if you already have networking contacts - or can get them - from some other activity (I know some people who have done quite well establishing contacts via political volunteering). What you want to do - if you want to teach third grade, a great school doesn’t make much difference. What are your “success criteria” - i.e. if your success criteria is to become a $1M a year Wall Street Investment Banker, a Podunk State MBA on top of a Podunk State B.S. is going to make that a LOT more difficult goal to achieve than Stanford followed by Yale. If your goal is to get a Mrs. and marry into one of the East Coast Elite families, going to school at North Dakota State (a fine school) probably isn’t going to introduce you to many men to target (but you might marry someone sitting on millions in oil shale rich farmland).
So, yes, it matters - for some people who have a certain subset of career goals and are willing to make the other life sacrifices involved to reach those goals. For other people, it doesn’t matter in the slightest, other than how it impacts Fate (had I gone to a different school, I wouldn’t have ended up married to my husband).
There’s some research out there that suggests that the benefit of highly selective schools is their “peer effects” - in other words, being around smart, networked people will afford you intellectual stimulation and experiences that you wouldn’t get (at the same degree) at a less selective school. The general rule is you should go to the most competitive school you can get into, especially if there’s a great degree of variance (say, Fort Valley State vs. Yale).
If you want to be a teacher, well then it might not matter as much. But in competitive fields, it can make a difference. Elite schools “signal” that you are bright, witty, credible, etc. and can provide an edge. Of course, networks matter too. Elite schools tend to have strong alumni networks which can benefit you. (But State U’s have this too - here in Texas being a UT or A&M grad might carry more impact that being from… Harvard.)
If you plan to go to grad school, it gets more complex. If you kicked ass at Fort Valley State and have good board scores, a lot of elite schools are going to be interested. Because you represent diversity. Most elite schools can cram their cohorts full of elite grads… this is good to a degree, but if they can find students who will excel from other places, they will definitely go after them. It makes them look good. When I sat on grad admissions committees at Harvard, that was always a consideration. If the class was shaping up to be more than 10% Harvard we started to worry.
If you want to be in politics it does matter - like here in Texas, you want to go to A&M or UT. An NYU degree won’t be much help at all; in fact it could be a liability.
The general consensus is that your college might matter in your first job out of school - but after that your competence and experience will override. Don’t underestimate how many people out there love the story of a successful person from modest beginnings. But there are some people who are pedigree whores. I have a masters and doctorate from Harvard, and when that fact gets out, people tend to have a reaction - usually they assume I’m really smart, but also some people assume I’m a snob. I went to a great, large state school for undergrad and I’m proud of that - Hook 'Em!- but I’ve been on hiring committees where some members viewed the candidate from the elite school in awe from the start, even if other candidates had equal or superior credentials.
Anyone can flunk out of an “elite” school; if it comes to that, I’m gonna say it doesn’t matter. However, it seems to me that there are a few qualities that an “elite” college/uni generally provide that a “lesser” school often doesn’t. Things that come to mind include: school reputation, curriculum quality, professional networking, exposure to and/or involvement in cutting-edge research, the size and use of the school’s endowment. I’m sure there are others.
Any single item may or may not be comparable between schools; however, the more “elite” the school, the more items it’s likely to have.
Who you meet during your college years and the types of friends you make while you are there is a much more important factor in future successes, than anything you could possibly learn, with the exception of savants and geniuses, I suppose, Gates, Hawking, Jobs, etc.
Remember, it still holds, “It’s not WHAT you know, but WHO you know”.
Being buds with a person who comes from say, P&G, or DuPont, or Google people, will do you much more than anything you could possibly put on your resume.
Sorry, but that’s the way life is. It isn’t fair, but there you have it.
Wasn’t it a thread somewhere around here where a poster said they would hire the C student from Stanford over the A student from U. of Pheonix? That philosophy is not uncommon.
Depending on what you want to do, the name of your school definitely matters. The thing is, a lot of state schools have great reputations that can lead to big opportunities. And those who say it’s “who you know,” are also correct. You’ll probably build a stronger professional network at Harvard than you will at Southwest Missouri State.
I agree with Thudlow Boink that a good “match” may be the most important thing. If you graduate as a confident and interesting individual, you’ll have a leg up in finding a job. My personal prejudice about State U. is that large and impersonal classes don’t lend themselves to the kind of college experience I found trans-formative.
There are so many variables it’s impossible to give a definitive answer.
But I can only tell an anecdote: my own.
I graduated from a “name” school. The reason I got the first job on my career path was because the person hiring me figured that a graduate from that school could be trusted, even though I didn’t have any paid experience yet. (I found that out much later.)
Not necessarily. In a state where most everyone went to one of a couple of state schools, those folks will know an alumnus in every corner of the state. They aren’t going to know the people who went to Harvard or MIT. They are going to know the people who went to State, and those are the people they’re going to give jobs to.
Does he believe it or can he just not afford the absurd tuition costs of Harvard?
In reality however when it comes to finding a job for 90% of the students who attend them, where they got their degree doesn’t matter but the people they met there and the connections they form might.
A school where the student is challenged and yet comfortable is the best of all possible outcomes, and it has little to do with the name on the wall.
It’s not true that it doesn’t matter at all but the stuff about “public Ivy’s” isn’t just fluff to make people feel better, it actually is true. I was engineering at Illinois, we had companies coming from far and wide to recruit our undergrads. I had a lot of friends from high school who went to private colleges, I was often surprised how little career placement support they got compared to what I had. Added bonus: I did not graduate with a 5-figure debt.
So obviously the department/program matters too. If you are doing a top program at a top flagship state school … you’ll probably do okay.
Sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn’t. The problem is you can’t predict ahead of time whether or not the hiring manager for the job you absolutely love is a college snob or focuses more on the person.
Personally, I’m wary of those that put emphasis on where one gets a college degree. My opinion is that those who think the big names mean something are using their school as a crutch to cover their general deficiencies.
I think the value is overestimated an awful lot, but there’s no question that it is valuable, and that it will help you get pretty much any job you try for. That’s not to say it’s automatic, or that you don’t need anything else but, you know, no one ever got fired for going with IBM.
I think you might be surprised at how competitive and renowned individual programs within state schools are. It really does depend on what you’re going to study. University of Minnesota would be better than, say, Harvard of Yale if chemical engineering is your field, for instance (at least in my opinion.) Or, in my field, photojournalism, schools like Western Kentucky and U Columbia-Missouri carry more prestige than Dartmouth or Princeton.
So, I guess I do think it matters somewhat, but it’s an incorrect assumption to think that the big name schools will always confer an advantage over publicly lesser-known schools. It’s very much industry-specific. And, once you get your foot in the door in the workforce, it doesn’t really matter as much.
For Law School. Only one, Chief Justice Roberts, has an undergraduate degree from Harvard. Of the others, three went to Princeton, two to Stanford, one to Georgetown, one to Cornell, and one to College of the Holy Cross. So they’re still elite Ivy Leaguers for the most part, but not all Harvard or Yale undergraduates.
My own anecdote is that I did go to an elite Ivy League university, but I now work for a financial institution where my boss, and her boss, and almost everyone working here who is at my level or above went to a state school. Some of them have advanced degrees, some don’t, and a few never even graduated from college. My own personal experience has convinced me that while I loved the education I got, and would never have traded it, I could easily have ended up where I am now if I had gone to my fallback school – I might even have been my boss’s boss.
Also, there is some reverse snobbery effect. I have learned over the course of my career to be careful who and how I tell about my undergraduate degree. There have definitely been cases where it has been a negative, particularly where bosses are afraid of having a subordinate whom they perceive to be more intelligent or better educated than they are.
I think “it depends” has to be the definitive answer in this thread. I learned on these here boards that it matters what school you go to for a degree in the US; it hardly matters at all in Canada (with some exceptions, of course). An accredited university is an accredited university here. Most people go to a local university; any number of people go to a further away university simply because it offers the degree they’re looking for.
In my working life (I’m 44 now), it seems to me that whether or not you have the degree is a hell of a lot more important than where you got it.
I went to an elite Ivy for undergrad. My husband went to a (very good) state school. We both went to the same grad school. My perception has been that people get much more impressed with my credentials, which has helped me not only in getting jobs but also when (I believe) I submit my resume to customers to try to win contracts. My husband has never had any trouble getting jobs, but he interviews much more strongly than I do. I interview poorly (in my opinion), and I think my degree has been a big help in predisposing people to think strongly of me before I actually show up for the interview. So I feel it’s been very helpful for me, but I’m not sure my husband would’ve gotten much benefit career-wise from it.
That being said, I have some incredible, awesome friends I met as an undergrad, and I think my husband envies me those a little. In general, as a transformative experience it was worth the money, I feel, quite apart from the career help it’s given me.
