Slashdot Mirror
Success Despite College Rejection
selan writes "Are those who are rejected by prestigious schools destined to lead mediocre lives? Or are great people more likely to succeed if they were rejected by top universities? An inspirational column in the Washington Post discusses the "Spielberg Effect", a theory that it really doesn't matter where you went to school."
Please back up your assertions. This is completely false. I speak as a college counselor with about 8 years of experience.
It does matter what undergraduate college you go to, but reputation, prestige, and ranking have nothing to do with it. Here is the principle:
When you look at results, most of the prestigious schools are defeated, beaten down, and put to shame by a relatively unknown class of schools, the small liberal-arts college. The mechanism should be obvious: small classes; professors who love to teach, have no research burden, and take an interest in your work; broad education that teaches you mental skills, not just job skills.
Since we're talking about grad school, let's take the percentage of graduates from college that eventually earn a PhD (from any institution, not necessarily the same one). So we're talking about your personal chances of getting a future PhD as a result of undergraduate college choice. Here's the top of that list:
I'll leave out the rest. Buy Loren Pope's excellent book Looking Beyond the Ivy League if you want the rest of the chart. Interesting to note, Princeton is the first of the vaunted Ivies to make this list at #21 (11.7%), and only because it is the one that behaves most like a small college. The next Ivy to show its face is Harvard at #37 (9.0%). Three of the Ivies and Stanford don't make top 50.
The list plays out the same way whatever measure you choose: MCAT scores, grad/med/law school admission rates (often 30-100% better than the prestige colleges), leaders and prominent figures produced, you name it.
Although their population is collectively tiny, the small liberal-arts schools produce half the professional scientists in this country. (Don't be fooled into thinking you need a technical school for a technical education.)
And now, here's the real kicker: many of these schools are not very selective. Reed, #3 on the list, will take you if you've got a B+ average, around 1300 on the SAT, and some demonstrable intellectual curiosity. But they will invariably turn out graduates that surpass those at famous schools.
Schools like Harvard deserve no credit for admitting "successful" people and then graduating "successful" people. I went there, and it improved me not at all. It's much more impressive to see a school take in an average student and make them great; or a good student and make them stellar.
---
Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
Wow, the infamous "OH HOW I ENVY AMERICAN STUDENTS" troll.
Either way, I haven't seen it in ages. This one is good enough for PhysicsGenius
I really hate Dan Patrick.
To compare the eventual Ph.D. production of whole institutions is misleading in the case of MIT. MIT is hevily weighted towards the engineering degrees, unlike the liberal arts schools like Mudd or Reed. In engineering, the BS is the terminal degree. These people get snapped up and put right to work. They don't need to get an advanced degree. A better comparison would be of chemistry departments, say, where one must get a doctorate to avoid being just a lab servant.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine