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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."
I would go to the best college, that I can afford to go to. I dont think UnderGraduate studies matter that much. It is for the higher degrees that you need to go to the prestigeous institutions....
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
it's coming up to the start of a new academic year I thought I'd take this opportunity to explain how lucky you Americans are to have a fraternity system.
;-). And while cliques certainly form in English Universities, the are all much too boring to come up with the idea of hazing. I fondly recall diving off a weir and almost drowning when I was 12 because everyone said I was chicken. If only it had been possible for me to gain respect in later life through similar tests, and if these tests could have been combined with pseudo Masonic rituals culminating in the awarding of a little badge, then that truly would have made my time at University worthwhile. And while I still have friends from University, these friendships seem so hollow compared to bonds of fraternal brotherhood since they are not based on solemn vows of fellowship, mutual sacrifice, group solidarity and owning the same poxy little badge.
English Universities are so dull by comparison. Like most students in England I had to rent private accommodation for my second and third years, but it never occurred to us to build a whole culture around collectively renting a rather dilapidated house in Clapham. It wasn't even single sex accommodation, so we couldn't engage in the fun and games of para-homosexual activities - Girls just don't have the same grip on your loyalties as your Greek brothers
Then there's sheer joy alcohol seems to bring fraternity members.. By the time I went to university the delights of getting dangerously drunk at parties had started to seem mundane. But to American students in fraternities, the bravado of excessive alcohol consumption is a an exciting new and illicit game where you can prove yourself worthy to all your male friends and simultaneously circumvent college alcohol policy - thereby proving what a rebel you are too. Gosh.
I am also rather fond of the references to ancient Greece. It reeks of a history far nobler and grander than anything a British University can instil its students with, and the wearing of togas must make it seem as authentic as a ploughman's lunch.
I think what I am trying to say is that Fraternities give young Americans the chance to grow up in their own time, and that it is regrettable that no similar opportunity is afforded to European Students. In particular, I find it sad that even some American students forego the opportunity to wear togas and claim to be Greek. Really this should be mandatory, so every graduate will be secure in the knowledge that they have gained something much more valuable than a degree from an American University - a little badge with some Greek letters on it.
Although I am not American, I admire the system so much that I would dearly love to become an honorary member of a fraternity. I have set my heart on becoming an alumni of Theta Omicron Sigma Sigma Epsilon Ro Sigma. I do so hope this is possible
I was brought up the traditional way fir a reasonably educated family in England. Led to believe that you go to school, college then university. It was never questioned and always assumed that this is the way it goes. If you want a good job, you go to uni. So I went and did it, at a decent uni too, came home and now, 3 years after leaving, I'm working in some crappy tech support job for peanuts. Meanwhile, the people I used to look at with pity that left school at 16 to take on some government youth training scheme have been working for almost 8 years. They've worked their way to a higher employment status than I'm at now. I assumed that since I had the degree I would quickly be able to progress past these and all the years of studying (well, partying) would become worthwhile, but I'm finding this isn't the case. To employers, I'm just another kid out of university like the thousands of others. The other kids though, the ones that left school? They're seen as valuable workers that have years of experience on the job. I don't regret going to uni, but occasionally I feel the bitterness rising :)
I demonstrate at Manchester University and there are people I know would be better off if they went straight to a job. Some people are planning to be HTML writers and have no desire to learn about computer architecture. They are wasting 3 years of their life during which they could get vital experience of a real job. People coming out of university cant get jobs because emplyers think they will want to move onto something better very soon after.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I think you need to look at the definition of "succeed" in this instance. I'm betting that it will come from the same kind of place as all that "having a life" and "making the most of yourself" nonsense.
E.g. if you become the head of a medium-sized business selling widgets worldwide then you have "succeeded". Big Fucking Deal.
The point of life is to have fun. That's it.
I recommend not working. Why give most of your life to an unfeeling corporation ?
I also recommend not getting married. It always ends in tears.
Forget what society expects you to be. Ignore what your parents want you to be. Be what you want to be- for yourself and no-one else.
graspee
Why does this sound to me like "Observational selection" that Carl Sagan listed in his Baloney detection kit ? What about those who got rejected and did not exactly shake up the world later in their life ?
The effects of a rejection could be positive or negative. There could be many reasons why Greg Forbes Siegman did what he did...too many variables and circumstances. "theorising" does not seem to be the right thing to do.
Science as a way of life.
Why should he be? Is there some requirement to always write glowing recommendations when describing students to colleges?
I work at a company that has several hundred employees, most of which of have PhDs in the hard sciences. (This includes myself.) Over the years, I've been on numerous hiring committees. From my experience I can say this, there is a broad tiering of schools -- community college versus major universities (including state schools and Ivy League). Which tier you attended can affect hiring decisions. Past that the specific school doesn't matter. Having discussed the qualifications of many interview candidates, I have NEVER heard anyone say hire person A over person B because they went to an Ivy League school. The discussions center around oral and written skills and personality. Specifically, whether the person's personality would be a good fit in the corporate culture. (Because of our work, we need to avoid the shy, introverted scientist. We need extroverts.)
Let's look at the facts:
From a forbes article: The vast majority of the 234 U.S. billionaires whose education level is tracked by Forbes magazine through 1999 finished college; 100 have some form of advanced degree, but 41--that's 18%--never got their college diplomas and two never even finished high school.
The world's richest man(i don't have to stress here
The point I am trying to make is not that education doesn't help you or isn't necessary, but rather bookish/college education is not the be all or end all in making a person a great individual or entrepreneur or leader.
If your makeup is that of someone who is entrepreneurial, creative, takes initiative/risks and works at it, college just becomes a formality to please the business mentality at large when you're starting. You're likely to succeed anyway.
The college you go to doesn't matter*
*Elitist wall-street and legal firms not included.
And the richest man dropped out of Harvard and wasn't rejected. But I agree with you anyway.
Im 32 years old and moved 24 times in my life, most of it as a child and teenager. I attended 5 different schools and lived in the states, germany, scotland and germany again. Along the way, as you can imagine, I grew somewhat emotionally independet of the judgement by academic authorities over me that at points I often came to disbelief at how so many people, especially in my homecountry germany, can take the system for granted. Only gradually are things changing to a more unconventional way of dealing with this. That's one of the rare things that are actually *good* to be copied from the US.
Everything that article says is so very true.
And there is still one thing I might want to add:
The reason for going to a University should be that you want to learn, not that you want a degree. If you can't gain that amount of self esteem (spelling???) without a degree it's almost shure a degree isn't the right thing for you. That probably is more so when studying an art.
If I where young again (gee I'm 32 now...:-) ) I'd be even more reckless. I'd pick the masters I've allways considered the best of trade, let's say for instance Frank Miller the comic artist, back a backpack travel to him, knock on his door and ask him to let me help him with anything I can offer for free and therefore let me look over his shoulder while he's drawing. For now I don't give a shit what papers or titles people have. They hardly mean zilch apart from showing their ability to walk the treadmill.
What counts is what ones self is willing to do and what ones self considers a great achievement or a poor performance. It's difficult, requires honesty but in the long run get's you farther. I bet that's the common demoninator all the people we call 'originals' have.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've been looking at many of the ivy-leage schools for graduate school, and so I've been glancing at their undergraduate degrees for a basis of what they expect. Guess what, they don't teach a lot to undergraduates. Actually, its pretty average. I was pretty surprised at first, even though I go to a great school its not a 'name-brand', but some are just pathetic.
Most college rankings seem to rely on reputation, peer-review, famous faculty, research, and the education recieved by graduate students. Instead undergraduate is by and large who you are and how much your worth, not brains. And to top it off, and this really got me, a large number of the 'best-of-the-best' schools use a partial or full pass/fail system to hide GPAs. This means that if you pass (usually 50-65% on course webpages), you get a pass - equal to a 3.0 when converted to a GPA by the school. Quite a nice trick, especially for those that use a partial system to hide tougher courses where GPAs would fall.
And the graduate programs aren't all that great at times. Many take 1 year to complete, not two. I actually laughed when I looked at UC Berkeley's for Computer Engineering: 10-11 crh (out of 24) can be applied to any 100-level or above course. Okay, okay, its not ivy-leage, but the school has a good rep.
So ivy-leage schools having great reputations is false, and I can tell you numerous stories related to me by PhD graduates from them. The thing is, for some people reputation is just as or more important than the education - like the MBA programs. Stanford and many others don't actually release an MBA student's grades to potential employers, but the key aspect to their program lies in the connections built in, advice from famous CEOs, and the education. The mere fact that Stanford is on your resume determines your salary.
So repeat after me: reputation does not equal education. And the article shows this, the name attached to his degree didn't make much of a difference. You just have to decide what mixture you want, obscurity vs fame, hardcore vs. hand-holding.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
The teacher should at least have had the decency to sit the kid down and say "Look Son, I'd be happy to write something for you but first I've gotta tell you what I will write and why I will write it. You see, I believe ... etc"
There's nothing troll about this comment, it's the truth. Universities are money making institutions first and foremost, if you don't believe it then you haven't attended one.
I can't begin to tell you how many people I've met that were allowed 'tenative' enrollment because they had none of the prerequisites so that the administration could get its greasy little hands on that prize of all prizes, financial aid money. Hell, as a grad student TA at my current university, you're forced to sit through the 'how things work' orientation, and there they give you a list of classes in which you are NOT allowed to give a student an F in because 'college is hard and students need chances' rrt wrong no, college administration needs more money so keep the student around longer.
I've also had the misfortune to work with someone that is on the 'academic excellence' comittee here, and the requirements for excellence and renewal of a contract for a professor is 1. how much money they bring in, 2. how much they produce, 3. how many grad students they turn out. 2 and 3 can be overlooked if 1 is well satisfied, and it doesn't matter what quality a teacher the person is.
So, in conclusion, he's right. If it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, and tastes like a duck then it's probably a duck, and they should just waive the requirements for admission and what have you and allow everyone to attend.
With all the articles going around putting focus on the college admissions process at top schools and how flawed it is im glad someone finally realizes the truth. That the importance of the name of your school is a distant third in my opinion to first what you make of your experience there and second to whether it's the right school for you. I know people at my school who are throwing away their four years drinking and partying. I also know people at Dartmouth who are miserable because they really wanted the environment that a large city school would provide but they chose Dartmouth for the name value (not to say that there arent others for whom living two seconds from miles of hiking and skiing isnt heaven.)
I wish more parents would think about this when theyre pressuring their kids to do after school activities that they have no interest in and take AP classes which arent right for them.
That said you cant totally discount the advantages to going to a big name school. But these advantages have less to do with the curriculum than they do with the people you can come in contact with both while at the university and after you graduate. For example there arent many places where you can take a course from ed Felten on IT and the law, and a course on programing from Kernighan while at the same time studying photography with emmet gowin. But like I said before having a prestigious faculty to work with doesnt do you any good unless you put the time in to get to know them.
--aiee
The best way is to admit all the 4.0 students and then let the achedimic program sort out thoes that will succede.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
A school is not in the buisness of providing charity to anyone who thinks they deserve to attend Harvard. The school is there to make money. That's it.
Now, if I can afford to attend, and I have grades that suggest I can hack it, then why should I be denied?
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
You need to wait a few more years, and perhaps you need to more actively make value from your education. By the sounds of it, you're expecting the rest of the world to pay you back - life just doesn't work that way.
Take interest in professional associations, ensure that in your work assignments you make use of the skills you learnt (analytical, critical thinking, good judgement), retain connections with your peers in the industry from university, etc. Make better use of your education.
Studies show that after 5-10 years, university educated students catch up and surpass those that didn't go to university. University pays off eventually, but you have to make it work for you.
Whoa. I.Q. and E.Q. aren't "good measures". A standard IQ test may tell if you have mental advantage in certain conditions, but not in all of them.
The simpler example will bring out the larger. Take a poor family, who has their child of 5 or 6 selling bags of nuts. The child packages different types of bags depending on the number of nuts per bag. Same child, also sells them, on the street, accepting cash, making change and not getting gyped. You take this child, and give her a math test. You'll find that this child to be able to do math really well to the degree of what this child does. Will this child be able to handle fractions, variable substitution, word problems and equation solving? That's something that would later determine if this child is a good math student. Because the child did well on the math test only means the child does well in those particular problems.
So what's the point? I.Q. and E.Q. tests can be easily flawed. The typical ones will give you a 'score' of 'ability' in a specific context. What if you gave me an IQ test in French? I'd do poorly since I understand very little french.
Depends on how you mean though, no? Would I want my doctor to not have gone through 10 years of college? Would I want my lawyer not to have? What about a programmer to work on cryptography algorithms or write a distributed database system? Now what about my junior programmer who writes web scripts? The salesman at macy's? Depends on the context, eh? Some of the richest people are there because of biz smarts, being in the right place at the right time, and education....some mix of it. Some need it, some don't.
Btw, I graduated from college, got my BA. Does my GPA and degree reflect who I am? To some degree. My experience in various types of coding (machine language, logic, high level programming) has given me some advantage to recognize problems and solutions. So it wasn't useless.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The reporter wrote:
"Dale and Krueger noticed something odd. In many cases, they found that applicants who were rejected by brand-name schools did as well in later life as those who were accepted."
Not so.
What Dale & Krueger noted is that people who were accepted by highly selective schools, but chose to attend less selective schools, later enjoyed the same level of professional success, on average, as their peers who did matriculate at the highly selective schools.
It may also be worth mentioning that D & K found this to the case only when the less selective school was only moderately less selective (so, for example, Harvard might be foregone in favor of, say, NYU, but not Remedial U.)
Everything else depends on how you answer my programming questions. If you have an MIT Ph.D, what good is that if you don't know answers to rudimentary programming questions? I don't care about "capacity to learn" at this point, I want someone who can produce. Being a big thinker is far less important to me than the ability to crank out good code fast. In fact I have found the big thinkers to be more useless than the humble trench soldier.
What utter nonsense. I'd like to see some sources for these "studies". Anyone who manages to get the foot into a career without the piece of paper (more and more difficult as the economy tanks) will do just fine after 5 to 10 years. On top of that, the skills you mention are alot more likely to come from work experience that university.
Get a new job?
Nobody is forcing you to work there for that amount. That's like saying "I'm the king of spain and I'm stuck shovelling pig shit for a dollar a day, boy being king sure sucks!"
You are equating university degree with your crappy job and let me assure you, it's also possible to find many crappy jobs without a degree as well.
- Toby
uh huh...and when I was in highschool I realized I had "spidey powers" and I have been defending NYC ever since.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
Drop out of school, did you read that anecdotal evidence? Wow that's powerful stuff!
Now where is my billion dollars?
- Toby
Honestly, I think you are biased cuz of the h1b program. The degree requirements in it are weird, and heavily, heavily weigh degree over experience. Over time, the h1b program has become used for technical people, whereas when it was created, congress probably assumed that it was more for hard science and academic types.
Some fields seem to want degrees more than others, but I do see people succeed without them. It is becoming more expected over time, simply because american high schools are so bad, employers want to see an extra 4 years of seasoning. Anyone under 30 in the US ought to have, or be working on a degree, because the trend isn't going to change - if anything, demographic changes in the next decade or two will leave the US with more university seats then needed, and thus probably result in almost everyone of that age cohort attempting to get degrees as standards at the bottom rungs sink.
ostiguy
Someone mod MickLinux way up!! =)
I can't believe how many people should actually be attending their community colleges instead of going right to a four-year college. Indeed, many of the colleges here in California actually like people who have gotten an Associate degree from a community college because they've proven you can do college-level work, more or less.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
See, that's the difference between our countries. We Americans are more interested in getting the money first, figuring we'll have time to enjoy it later.
Ironically, we're not very big on saving either, so most of us end up spending the money in absurd ways. Big apartments that we never see because we're always at work. Sportscars that max out at 180 mph (300 kph, in Britishian), but only serve to slog us through the gridlock on the way to and from work. Children we don't have time to raise.
Could somebody over there come over and throw a bucket of cold water on our economy? Before we go crazy and start invading obscure third world countries or something.
I guess this post just proves the maxim, "Sufficiently advanced cynicism is indistinguishable from trolling."
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Having found nothing here I want to spend my last two mod points on, I will obey your tagline :)
The point of the article seem to me to be NOT anything to do with the value (or lack thereof) of a name-brand diploma at all. It struck me as being about how *driven* a person can be, and how that can lead them to succeed despite not having top-level "credentials".
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
A good education gives you a choice: you can limit your risks and your rewards, or you can accept a lot of risk and possibly make it to the very top. Most people apparently do the rational thing given this choice: they limit their risk and their rewards. Most people are happy with a decent income, a nice family, predictable work, and reasonable success at their job. Most people deep down don't really desire to be Bill Gates or Steven Spielberg.
Pity then that the entrance criteria condem it to be second rate at best. A third of the places are still reserved for children of Alumni.
The advantages of going to the 'top schools' in the past used to be that you would meet the right people to help with your career. These days senior management tends to come from the MBA schools and so your undergrad school does not matter as much as where you did your MBA.
Better teaching can help you succeed, but as far as teaching goes Harvard does not impress me. Harvard shops for big names whose best work is generally behind them. The actual teaching tends to get done as often as not by grad students. I know as my wife TA'd a Harvard course.
Of course the one redeeming feature of Harvard is that you can take classes at MIT so you can still get a world class education.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I dunno... Both ring that "A Degree is just a piece of paper" sound to me.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
OK, I'll bite.
I am currently working for a company in which the director of software, who has a major problem with Ph. D.s, feels like this. He proudly says that Ph. D. are useless and that he would not trust them to code unsupervised.
Well, over the past few years, he turned down lots of resumes just because they had "Ph. D." on them. He hired a bunch of people with BS from no-name colleges because of the experience listed on the resume and their supposed familiarity with currently popular coding methodologies and paradigms.
This guy turned down people so brilliant that, in a just world, he would have been cleaning their socks.
However, one of the team leads here had enough political clout to resist this, and he packed his team with people with advanced degrees from good schools. Despite being specifically warned by the said Director of Software that he would be fired if his team slipped. The salaries offered to these people were up to 20% less than those offered to the "experienced programmers".
As you might guess, I am in this latter group. For my sins, I have a Ph.D from a good school.
Well, guess what happened?
It took longer for the Ph.Ds to "boot up", as it were, to become familiar with the development environment, to learn the finer points of C++ etc. But once that happened, they started outperforming the rest so much that it was not even funny. They delivered faster, their architectures were so much better designed, and their code had far fewer bugs.
Finally, when the product deadlines started slipping, the same Ph. Ds (whose component had less than 1% of all the filed bugs) were put to work to help the others pull their shit together.
I worked on fixing bugs in several components filed by the so-called experienced programmers. What I found was an appalling mishmash of poorly thought-out, poorly designed code held together by glue and duct tape. Race conditions and memory leaks abounded.
However, I also found that these "experienced programmers" were masters of political maneuvering, deflecting blame and of the ignoble art of covering their sorry asses. They had a good excuse for every bug found in their code.
However, over time, it became obvious to the higher management as to who are the really valuable people in the Software group. When the layoffs came (as they have done everywhere), they hit mostly the "experienced programmers". The Director of Software is now on the run trying to cover his ass for his choice of hires.
Magnus.
My father immigrated to the United States in the early 70s. He had the equivalent of perhaps a 5th grade education. He learned to speak English by watching the Flintstones in his tiny flat while working construction for some company. He eventually saved up enough money to move his family here too.
In the late 70s he was laid off. Since then, he has run a fruit store, partially owned a Pizza place, and today he runs a construction company. In my opinion, he provided very adequete shelter, food, and clothing for his 4 kids and wife remarkably well under the cirmcumstances, and is now financially well off that he owns and rents 3 houses, and has a sound retirement plan, and can still give his kids a boost if they need it ("Dad, can I borrow $85,000 to buy a house?").
My dad also helped my eldest sister go to college. She trained to be an architect, worked for someone else for about 10 years, and very recently started her own firm. She also agrees that school is meaningless bullshit, but regrets that it was required for her choice of career.
My second eldest sister received a GED after dropping out of High School. Since then she has been a hair stylist, a pastry chef at some top rated restaurants, a stock broker assistant, a mother of two, and is currently pursuing a successful graphics design business which services the culinary industry.
My older brother dropped out of High School when he was 16, and worked construction with my father until about 28. After that he went to work for a construction supplier, grew his department by perhaps 500%, and eventually started his own construction equipment sales business which seems to be doing him well.
Myself? I graduated High School, skipped college, studied computers, worked MCS at Dean Witter, then worked at an ISP for 3 years, and now I run my own computer consulting practice which I think has remarkable potential.
When you're in High School it's easy for those sadists to make you think you're going to be a fucking loser for not obeying their rules. Sadly, it can really get to some of the students. While the white kids who shoot up their schools make the news, there are thousands of others who take their own lives every year who you never hear about.
But the truly disturbed people are the ones who believe the mantra, and devote their entire lives to fanatic pursuit of the straight A's, who craft every action in their life so that it appeases the all powerful college admissions, and then the big corporation which will employ them. These are the people who I feel for now. They believed that the formula for success was to follow the rules, take no risks, do as you're told, think inside the boundaries. They are wrong, this is the formula for mediocrity.
It's not until maybe a year or two after you're out of school that it occurs to you that you've spent years of your life putting up with bullshit, that everything that your teachers swore would happen has in fact been a lie, and that your life isn't really over. In fact, more the opposite, you find that your life is now beginning.
If you're in that situation now, please don't let it get you down. Everyone is shouting at you about how important it is, but if you have any intelligence at all, it's really not. Once you exit the hell that is education, a sudden sensation of freedom will wash over you. For awhile you will be terrified, afraid, but soon you realize that what you mistook for fear is in fact something you've simply never experienced until now: Unlimited potential.
The piece of paper? It is an inferior substitute for experience, intelligence, and creativity. If you already possess one of these essential traits, you don't need to waste your time trying to obtain a superficial surrogate.
Do something worthwhile with your time. Anything you do is the right decision--the only truly wrong decision you can make is deciding to do nothing.
What school you went to (or whether or not you got a degree) matters until approximately four seconds after you get your first job. Then it's all about your performance (including, under performance, your ability to play office politics (and including, under your ability to play office politics, your ability to act as professional as the job requires)). Many of these things can be shaped at college, but whether your degree says Harvard or Oakland University matters not one shit once you've gotten a job in your chosen career track. I've been in the workforce 10 years and no one has asked what school I've been to since my first job interview, even then, it was my ability to intern for free for three months that got me the gig, not the fact that I went to some school on the east coast.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
I have NEVER heard anyone say hire person A over person B because they went to an Ivy League school. The discussions center around oral and written skills and personality. Specifically, whether the person's personality would be a good fit in the corporate culture.
Thus the best course of action would be to goof off by socializing where-ever you can. Socialize, socialize, socialize. Go to a cheap school and save yourself the money.
Jobs that one can do without much interaction are slowing being shipped overseas to people who are paid $2 an hour. The lone geek is going the way of the factory worker.
That's just life.
Table-ized A.I.
Successful people work for a very short time in "crappy support" jobs before moving on to better things. Successful people don't whine about their crappy job, they go out into the big, scary world, and work, push, cajole, and sweet-talk their way into the kind of job they realy want. They take risks. They take action.
Anarchists never rule
Anyways, I got deferred at MIT, which essentially means rejected. Why?
No, it means deferred. I think you're assuming and awful lot about what the admissions people care about, over-estimating your own credentials, and under-estimating your peer's. MIT is one of the preeminent technology schools in the world. You are probably a great student, but the number of applicants to a school like MIT is enormous. Out of a pool this large, there are bound to be people better qualified than you. Them's the breaks. I don't think MIT gives cares about if you played a sport or not.
I'm applying there for grad school (among many other places). I will graduate from Virginia Tech this May with a 3.6 in-major GPA and about the same for my cumulative GPA. I'm doing undergraduate research next semester. I'm a computer science major with a minor in math and a minor in physics. And I think my chances of getting into MIT are slim.
Things like President of National Honor Society club, etc. There was a kid at my school who got in early at Princeton with a 1250 SAT (thats not good) because he played water polo. Last year, one of my friends won the National Merit Scholarship to attend Johns Hopkins....and they wouldnt even admit him!
An SAT score of 1250 is just fine. SAT scores are bunk. They demonstrate one thing: your ability to take the SATs. You don't know why these people were accepted and rejected, so stop pretending.
Then why not do away with the affirmative action for the children of the rich and make it equal opportunities for everyone?
It is very difficult to measure the 'qualifications' of candidates in the US because unlike most countries there is no national test of academic achievement. The SAT quizes used in the US are designed to test 'aptitude'. When I was at MIT we didn't use them for admissions, there was simply no correlation between SAT scores and how well the kids did - although there is a slot on the application for the score because folk who take them tend to want to add it.
A more interesting question than whether legacies are as qualified as the other entrants would be whether they achieve as much.
I'm aware that MIT and CalTech don't preference legacies in admission, and I commend them for it. But they're unique in that respect.
No they are not, I can't think of a single international class institution that has a formal bias in their admissions system in favor of legacies. Certainly not Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester or any of the UK Universities.
I did a bit of research into some of the Ivy league schools. It appears that the press comments on the fact that Bush only got into Yale as a legacy has caused some recent changes.
Harvard's policy has changed, it now states that "Q: Are a student's chances of admission enhanced if a relative has attended Harvard? A:The application process is the same for all candidates. Among a group of similarly distinguished applicants, the daughters and sons of alumni/ae may receive an additional look". Interestingly the question is not actually answered, the Yale system which admitted Bush used the same admissions ?process for all applicants, it was just that legacies got in with much lower grades. Basically Harvard are trying to play both sides of the fence, they want to claim to be equal opportunity while also telling their allumni donors that their child can expect special treatment.
According to the Asian American Political Coalition The average combined SAT score of Harvard legacies was 35% lower than for all those admitted, and legacies were more than twice as likely to get in. Thirty-six (36%) percent of Harvard legacy applicants were admitted versus only 17 percent of all applicants.
I did quite a bit of searching on the Yale site and could not find any mention of the lecacy issue whatsoever. This is kinda curious since one would expect that if the college was now selecting on merit it would want to say so in the wake of all the media criticism.
However even with reform in student selection Yale and Harvard will take much longer to erase the long term consequences of their other discriminatory policies - in particular not hiring jewish faculty. MIT became a research powerhouse in Engineering in the 60s and 70s because it was the only first rank university in the area who would give Jewish faculty tenure at the time.
Unfortunately it appears that the only way that people can get upset about this particular type of discrimination is by viewing it through the prism of race. Certainly there is a racial dimension - the legacy quotas and preferences are also effectively discrimination against minorities. Harvard's attempts to keep 'affirmative action' appear to be motivated in part by the realisation that if they cannot use affirmative action to correct the imbalances caused by their bias towards legacies their affirmative action for legacies might become an illegal racial bias.
However it is also notable that people such as the failure in the Whitehouse who benefited from this type of discrimination in their favor can be so opposed to affirmative action.
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"The other thing I would dispute is that University teaches you to think. In my experience, University does no such thing. The number of incurious, unintellectual, ignorant unndergrads I met at college surprised and disappointed me. The number of undergrads who actually apply critical thinking skills to anything outside their narrow degree specialisation, is few indeed."
That's because college is grade 13, 14, 15, & 16 no matter where you go.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Otherwise it matters!
Besides, I thought the /. party line was that school is irrelevant. Or did that notion die with the dotcoms?
Best Buy can have you arrested
I did read the article. And it is true that people succeed without Going to fancy schools. In fact, success often comes (at least in America) from hard work. That's the american dream. And I agree with the intent of the article. Just because Harvard or (in slashdot land ) Cal tech rejected you and you had to go to Cal State Northridge, does not mean you will be a failure (far from it).
Now, the article did not argue that university is useless, or that the best schools are bad. But there are those in this thread who seem to think because famous person x did not graduate from college, therefore a college degree is useless. This is just absurd.
I have a degree in film production from the school that rejected spielberg. I am also a worthless film director. My student films are incoherent crap. I heard, over and over again from the people that didn't get in the story of Spielberg's rejection. It is always cited as proof that school is a waste of time, the USC production program is stupid, etc. I asked my advisor about the Spielberg effect. He told me that that's what USC film uses to describe people who insist on measuring their success against the wunderkind like Spielberg. The fact was that Spielberg was rejected because USC cinema had nothing to offer him. He was already a talented film maker. He didn't want to learn the craft, he wanted to direct films. Film school would have done nothing for him.
I am obviously biased. But I am very glad I went to school and got an expensive degree. It was worth every penny, not because it put me in a position to be a super successful and famous film director. You can't teach that. But you can teach the sort of universal skills that I use every day in my work. School was useful for me. I specialized in cinematography and also did a lot of computer graphics learning on the side. I had a chance to learn from some amazing teachers(and some bad ones too of course). I got my hands on equipment you can't just play with on your own. And I got to learn the way things are done and why, instead of having to go out and screw up on my own. I was very prepared for my career. (I work as a 3d artist) A one semester cinematography course from Woody Omens was worth the price of admission.
Universities are not designed to create the super succesful. Those people are not created, they are born. Universities are intended to teach people a broad range of information, to create well rounded individuals capable of success in any aspect of their future careers. In school I learned to speak french, the history of japan and how to draw. I also learned the basics of editing, cinematography, animation, sound, direction and acting. I am terrible film director. I don't feel bad about that. I am not going to be Steven Spielberg. Nor am I going to be Hemingway or Nabokov. University is not for the geniuses. Its for the rest of us. So put it to rest. Just because people who don't go to university are succesful does not mean that universities are useless. If people that didn't go to high school learned algebra on their own, would you claim that Universities offer nothing? No, a degree is not necessarily an indicator of future performance. But it will often be useful to YOU in your career.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
In the work our company does, a PhD is not really required. In fact, a PhD in any hard science from any reasonable university means that you have the technical skills to do the job. Therefore, the real issue is how do you fit into the corporate culture, and whether you can communicate the results of our work in written and oral forms. Hence the focus on communication skills and personality.
One of the things I learned after college is very few people actually continue to work in the area of their degrees. Nonetheless, the skills developed during that degree -- for a PhD that means the ability to work on one's own, the perseverance demonstrated by completing the PhD, and general technical skills -- are valued.
right. either an ivy league degree is a golden ticket, or it is useless and it is better to be a drop out. i am tempted to believe that since most people don't go to ivy league schools, most people have an interest in knocking them for their own self image, but I think that is probably not the only reason people like these stories. people love the underdog, the rag to riches horatio alger tale. it is very american. also, I would point out that success is always a journey, and for some people it peaks with high school football fame, and for others it builds over a lifetime to finally result in winning a nobel prize at 90. folks who get in to an ivy league have a sort of early success, but no monopoly on success beyond 21 years of age. tomorrow is promised to no one, ivy league or little league. I went to one, learned alot, made moderate grades, and found out that I had been a big fish in a small pond all my life. that alone was worth the trip. the connections thing has done nothing for me, but I got alot more interviews with a big name degree. it also meant to some people that I probably knew how to communicate well, think on my feet, and be adaptable as time goes by beyond knowing all the intricasies of the JDK or every arcane perl syntax. no, I wasn't taught to be a critical thinker, but when you are in a seminar of 6 people and the whole point is to be guided by a prof with years more experience to form and communicate your own opinions on the works studied, you get good practice, and feedback. you also get confidence and experience in thinking for yourself, and taught the lesson that that way of thinking is the commonality to your course of studies. in the tech zone, there seems to be especially little repect for academic knowledge and for a liberel arts education where you learn useless things like art history instead of how to hack linux onto NES. look, I code for a living, and love it, and chose it over IB and strategic/management consulting, but I appreciate that having studies other things in school, there is a real difference in studying some things at a great school - like literature, philosophy, etc. b/c at such schools you find the leaders in studying these things, and you find other students who really get it and can challenge you. besides all that, the real reason to go to university is to learn something, become a well rounded person, mature and "actualize" - blah - it's droll, but I was exposed to worlds well beyond IT and science I would never have touched on my own as a high school grad. the point is not to make a bunch of money when you get out - that's what MBAs are for - the point is to take a few years to learn more about the world and to hopefully learn to think, what's important to you, and to deal with other preople. there are plenty of people making more money than me, but I still feel like I am better for having gone to a good college and broadened my knowledge and interests, and getting the background in intellectual concerns so that I can approach on my own nearly any topic and get somewhere in understanding it. I also learned what is important to me, and it isn't being richer than you, it is being rich enough to do what matters to me and my family, and then getting on with living not just being more 'successful'.
...begins in wonder
The thing that struck me about this article is just how obvious its conclusions should be. The article starts of as if the rational assumption is that your destiny and accomplishments are somehow pre-determined by what some ivy league university thinks of your application. I'm sure the ivy league universities would just love it if everyone believed that, but it is patently false.
I really shouldn't have to be saying this, but the things that lead to sucess are character and hard work. Where one goes to school makes no difference at all. The ivy league schools get a good reputation because they are able to pick and choose applicants who they believe have the character and intelligence to suceed. From there it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Going to Harvard no more gives you character and discipline any more than not going there deprives you of them.
When one looks at history it is evident that most of the great discoveries and accomplishments were achieved by those with mediocre academic records. Einstein was working as a patent clerk because he couldn't get a teaching job. Edison didn't even have a sixth grade education. Both Newton and Maxwell were undistinguished prior to their major discoveries.
Once upon a time people understood that it is character and hard work that lead to greatness, why our culture has forgotten that I just don't know. Nowadays people seem to think that success is some kind of trick, or is achieved though one's image. So people chase after degrees from the ivy league because they think that if other people think that they are great then they will be. Sorry Charlie, the most someone with that approach will achieve is the ability to con everyone including themself. True greatness comes from within and it is not something that can be bought, faked or manufactured.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Universities are money making institutions first and foremost
Many are, but not all. You often hear of large, respected universities who hire ex-CEOs as Presidents. This has never turned out well. Fortunately, you still hear of large, respected universities who hire academics as Presidents.
But the real key is to distinguish universities from colleges. The former grants graduate degrees; the latter grants only undergraduate degrees.
A college is a teaching institution. They have no need for big research grants. Their professors are self-selecting: educators, first and foremost.
The one drawback is that they may be less able to offer financial aid. But even this is often not a problem. Alumni loyalty is very high when you can drop in 10 years after graduation and still chat with your profs on a first-name basis. This is no exaggeration; I speak from both indirect and direct experience.
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Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
Because Spielburg was rejected by the school he wanted to go to. Gates wasn't; Gates dropped out of Harvard.
For my chosen profession, law, where you went to school makes all the difference in the world - and it matters not a hill of beans.
If your goal is to end up on the U.S. Supreme Court, well, five of the nine current justices went to Harvard Law (Darth Bader graduated from Columbia but went to Harvard), two went to Stanford, and the other two went to Northwestern and Yale. Roughly the same goes for most federal district and appellate judges.
Want to work for Bill's daddy at the 213-attorney Seattle home office of Preston, Gates and Ellis? Ask yourself, where do they do on-campus interviews? Aside from the local schools (Seattle U. and the Universities of Washington and Oregon), PG&E recruits from Bezerkely, Columbia, U of Chicago, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, Northwestern, NYU, Penn, Stanford, UVA, and Yale. Only about a third of their hires come from the local schools, and most of those are from the ultra-super-mega-hyper-prestigious (just ask 'em, they'll tell ya) UW. In other words, your chances of being hired by them are about zero if you did not attend any of those schools - and this firm is based in Seattle. I would submit that most large law firms have similar hiring practices.
Before giving up hope, though, consider what it's like to work there. Sure, the pay is good and the resources are near infinite, but the hours are long - 100 hour weeks are the norm rather than the exception. What are you doing then, practicing real law, representing real clients? Hardly. Most of the work involved is adding a few more zeroes to the end of some already-obscenely-wealthy white guy's bottom line. Finally, the careers there are generally quite short - a select few make partner, but most are cut loose after a few years.
Okay, so what's a young non-Ivy JD grad to do? Practice real law, of course. Represent ordinary people in real-world disputes and actually go to court once in awhile. Most attorneys make their living this way and their clients don't much care where they went to law school.
In sum, the black-and-white answer is that there is no black-and-white answer.
I'll agree. From what I've seen, folks with a PhD in CS are the ones who are capable of taking an idea and turning in into working code. It's the folks that follow them - the non-academics - who take that and, in turn, create somethign that's useful and usable.
I've seen more than a few academics crank out very elegant, very intricate designs that were effectively broken because their implemenation just plain sucked rocks. All too often, they were unable to pull away from the abstractions and focus on the concrete implementation. As a result, they just did not seem to understand that there were points where their design broke down and failed to deal well with limitations in the hardware (memory constraints, CPU usage, disk access speeds), the operating system, or the implementation language.
They just don't understand that in the real world, there are often places where you want to break that beautiful design and layers of abstraction, because doing so will give you a 10x performance increase that makes their project usable on something other than a state-of-the-art workstation.There are PhD's who understand these sort of things, and can crank out some really good code. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there are very few PhD's who enjoy this type of work... they got their PhD, after all, because they like thinking in terms of abstractions, and elegant design, and other "big problems".
The folks who get a kick out of optimizing performance, or enhancing the UI, or dealing with cross-platform compilation problems, or tweaking code so it's portable across 20 different architectures... these folks are as essential to the software as the PhDs, but because of where they derive their enjoyment from working, they're unlikely to ever become one of those PhDs.
IMHO, success comes when members from each of these groups understand their particular strengths and weaknesses, and learn to defer to each other's areas of expertise.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
People make fun of liberal arts education saying that you don't learn anything applicable to the real world. Sometimes, this is true. One of the difficulties with a liberal arts education is that you have to believe in it for it to work. I know many students who took the easy classes to fulfill requirements outside of their major. If you do that, a liberal arts education won't work. You have to push yourself in other disciplines and open up to alternate ways of looking at problems. It's through attacking a variety of problems from many angles that makes real thinkers.
One of my main regrets of my undergrad is that I didn't realize this until the end of my second year. If I had know this when I was applying to college, I would have applied to smaller schools (or interdisciplinary programs) and put much more thought into which classes I took my first two years.
"The school is there to make money. That's it."
Many colleges and universities have not-for-profit status. They don't exactly have "shareholders" in the traditional sense of a for-profit public corporation.
-Stu
The educational rigor at Harvard and other ivy league schools is much tougher than pretty much every other school in the nation
;-)
The ivy league label is overrated. My alma mater (Johns Hopkins) has repeatedly refused to join the ivy league, mostly for finacial reasons. When I was an undergradute, there was a growing annoyance with the assumption that "ivy league" always means the best education. Most of this resentment stemmed from the grade inflation that was going on at the ivies. I remember one student publication had a nice set of graphs showing the declining SAT scores of incoming freshmen at Harvard contrasted with the increasing GPAs of the same students after admittance to Harvard. Hopkins proudly shunned grade inflation, but it was frustrating nonetheless, especially if you were applying to professional schools.
Then again, Hopkins students love to complain about how bad they have it
is go to a 'brand name' college with no grade inflation.
:D
I can't vouch for other types of grad schools, but law school admissions is almost entirely about the LSAT, with a secondary emphasis on GPA. Borderline candidates will then have their extracurriculars looked at, and the college is in there somewhere, but at the top law schools it's almost as good that you went to a state school in Wyoming- they like geographic diversity, too.
Your degree from Harvard, which generally puts you a hundred thousand or so in the hole before you ever take a law school class, and a 3.5 will get you into the exact same place as someone who graduated from any state school with a 3.6 and the same LSAT. Moreover, they'll have gotten there for free.
Good luck to the high school seniors applying. Just remember, it's not the end of the world if you get turned down
U of M Law '05
Welcome to America, if you are smart, work hard, and are determined to make it in life no matter what anybody says, you'll make it.
Is that not kind of the entire point of this countries existence? To create a place where that is possible?
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First of all, the gentleman you replied to did do some research - he quoted a report done by the U.S. News and World Report, while you merely pulled a figure out of your head. FYI, this is what Harvard has to say about the average SAT score of those admitted:
Harvard does not have clearly defined, required minimum scores; however, the majority of student admitted to the College represent a range of scores from roughly 600 to 800 on each section of the SAT I as well as on the SAT II Subject Tests.
So the average is somewhere between 1200 and 1600 for the majority of their students. 2/3 of their students is still a majority.
Second, from what you just said, I think you have either never taken a course in biology or genetics or you are in dire need of a refresher. There is (significantly) less than 1% of a genetic difference between you and anyone else on this planet. And what you would call "environment" is largely constructed from the status quo. There is very little difference, environmentally speaking, between the richest and the poorest Amercians experience.
Your post actually went a long way toward proving that socio-economic factors far outweigh brains and talent when it comes to getting into elite institutions like Harvard.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
The statement you make on environment does not match your conclusions and is in and case demonstrably false. Rich kids sent to pressure cooker type crammers are likely to do far better than poor kids left to fend for themselves in schools where the roof leaks and there are metal detectors at the entrances to keep the number of guns brought to school down to a few dozen a week.
One of the big problems with the SAT tests as originally designed is they are meant to test 'aptitude' not achievement. The ideology that accompanied the tests is that practice is not meant to affect your scores. Nobody really believes that of course, selling tuition is a big business. Only when it comes to justifying the entrance procedure is the ideology asserted.
There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support the 'aptitude' claims and a mountain of evidence that disproves it. See Stephen Gould's 'Mismeasure of Man'.
OK so there is now a fixup, there are SAT tests in individual subjects. The problem here is that they are adjuncts to the school curriculum so they become just yet another stupid test US kids have to do. The contradicition at the heart of the US education system is that the kids are tested endlessly, more often than in any other school system. At the end of that process however they end up without any nationally recognized credential.
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Actually I think you just agreed with what I said, which was that social factors(i.e. upbringing, wealth, social status), rather than the environment had more to do with where a person ended up in life. I meant environment in the biological sense - we all breath the same air, eat food grown in the same soil, etc. The difference in the "environment" of a rich kid and a poor kid is entirely a social construct.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I think that most evolutionary biologists would define the environment widely to include the social factors you state. Certainly Gould did.
Differences in nutrition were certainly major factors in Victorian times and a significant factor until after WWII. These days you could still make a claim wrt health care being a significant non-social factor but the major environmental factors affecting test score performance would be social.
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OK, so you are arguing that Princeton acts the most like a small liberal arts college BECAUSE IT PRODUCES THE MOST PHDs, BY PERCENTAGE OF GRADUATES?
No, you're reading my statement backwards. Of the Ivies, Princeton is the most like a small college simply by comparison: lack of a graduate school, focus on teaching quality, etc.
I made the assertion that it scores higher on the "PhD metric" than the other Ivies because of that. Not the other way round. Of course, you're free to disagree with that.
Naturally, I never stated or implied that anyone should judge by a single metric. Still, I should've made that clearer.
I would almost prefer that you make your statistics by the percentage of grads that DON'T go into medicine, law, or investment banking. But even that would be silly.
I don't have the chart handy right now, but I don't think those are included. The practical degrees in medicine, law, and business are not the PhD (although you can get one if you, for example, plan to research or teach rather than practice).
[USNews does] a solid job of factoring in all the MANY facets of a school in reaching their final ranking
If by "solid" you mean "deliberately fudged every year to sell more magazines," then you're right. Colleges don't change fast enough to justify a new list every year; USNews needs to manufacture the effect. See the article I linked in another reply in this thread.
Furthermore, if you look at the "facets" they combine, many of them have no justifiable bearing on the undergraduate experience at any given school.
But then, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. You must be working for some small college that didn't make it to the top of that ranking.
Almost a nice try. Try thinking a little more clearly. College counselors work for high schools, not colleges. Or we consult in private practice.
I'm an exception, though. I work for free. For my paycheck, I do Unix kernel hacking for 60 hours a week. But every winter, I spend 20-30 more at night consulting pro bono (which my professional colleagues think is insane; some of them pull down $2k per student. But I do my job as well as they do, without the parents holding my pursestrings).
I do it because I see too many bright students work their asses off for four years just to beg and claw for the meager scraps of self-esteem that the prestige colleges hand out in April. I have no loyalty to any institution except for overall demonstrable quality.
Playing into the prestige game means that "first choice" and "most difficult" are synonymous; therefore, the fate of 4 out of 5 college applicants is to attend their second or third or sixth choice -- except for those poor souls who have already surrendered to the myth, adjusting their self-image downward to "realistic" levels. What a way to start a life.
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Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.