Slashdot Mirror
Who Needs Harvard?
theodp writes "Slate's Daniel Gross explores why big corporations are hiring fewer Ivy Leaguers. Is it because today's bosses aren't as snowed by polished young Ivy grads as they were in the past? Or are today's Ivy League graduates simply so wealthy that they no longer feel the need to find stable, high-paying jobs at big companies?"
I can speak from the perspective of UVa out here in Virginia -- which was ranked as the #1 public school last year, and is tied for #2 this year with University of Michigan. #1 this year is UC Berkley, who trades spots with UVa every few years. (All these facts are courtesy of the worst ranking agent ever, US News and World Reports)
Anyway, basically what I'm trying to say is that public schools are making huge headway into almost every important field. Berkley has the amazing engineering program that the best schools compete neck and neck with. Michigan has extremly competitive law, business, and medical schools. Virginia has #4 law program, the #12 business program, the #24 medical school, a top 5 commerce school (that puts out some of the best investment bankers in the world) -- etc, etc.
Between the three top public institutions, every facet of higher education is relatively well covered from medicine to liberal arts to commerce to engineering. Today, wasting 50 grand a year on a Harvard education may still be worth it if you're not lucky enough to be living in Virginia, California or Michigan, but honestly -- the concept of building a network of connections and alumni support is well expressed in our public instituions today.
Perhaps the biggest difference between a public school and a private schools is a fact that wikipedia expresses -- the endowments are huge for schools like Harvard and Yale. UVA had an endowment of 1.4 billion dollars, harvard had 22.6 billion, and yale was at 11 billion. Harvard is the second largest nonprofit after the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
Those are the facts that set apart a university like Harvard from a UVA or a Berkley. I think in the coming years these kinds of huge differences between top public schools and top private schools will increase. While the economy was bad in the earlier part of this century (hehe), schools like Berkley and Virginia took hits in funding. In virginia for example, the tuition was raised somewhere around 30%, and funding dropped pretty substantially. Certain public institions in the state that weren't doing as well dropped substantitally in rank according to US News and World Reports, and without public support, pulic (!!) institions can't do well.
For now at least, UVa looks to be going more and more the private route, especially with the new legislation on the table specifically asking for more leeway in the strings the government has attached to the institution. Hopefully as a more expensive, but still cheaper top instition that's quasi private/public will make for a better University overall. As per now, I can honestly say that going to a instition other than a top public one if you live in the states of Virginia, Michigan, or California (if accepted of course) would be a mistake. Perhaps getting lots of money to go to an expensive Ivy is not a bad plan, but the majority of them don't even offer merit based scholarships.
Anyway, there were quite a few cents more than my 0.02 there, but take from this what you will. =)
And from the actual paper: "Between 1980 and 2001, the percentage of Fortune 100 top executives with Ivy League undergraduate degrees fell by four points (to nearly 30%) while the proportion from public schools increased by 16 points (to 50%)." The paper then goes on to say that this effect may be because there are more people graduating from state schools than ivy league schools (Harvard continues to graduate approximately 1600 kids ech year).
As someone who graduated Harvard recently, I can tell you my hypothesis as to what the difference is. When most of my peers graduated they either went on to become consultants (a nice pay-check + world travel), graduate school (both professional and academic), or investment bankers (really nice pay-check). A few became newspaper reporters, governmental employees, or started working at a large publicly traded corporation, but these things were not the norm.
Also, though there are some rich (and very rich) kids at Harvard, there are also poor and middle class kids from public schools. Harvard's financial aid is good that you can afford to go if you are admitted. They even give you money to buy winter clothes if you can't afford them. But it's so much fun to stereotype, isn't it?
There are several stories/theories that are put out there, all claiming to be the right one.
For example, The Chicago Public Library tells us that it's because originally a sports league of four schools, the number four being "IV" in Roman numerals.
The straight dope, on the other hand, basically says it's the "Big Eight" (formerly "Big Three") who got together for sports competitions, and the "Ivy" in "Ivy League" refers to the Ivy growing on the walls. Wikipedia seems to agree with this, but has a much more detailed information on the league and the schools which form it, as well as other related information.
I have 1 million monkeys on a million year contract to make me a better sig.
Please see this. Since the thread started about Harvard, it seems only fair to point out how the new President of Harvard University has moved to change this over the last year. If your family makes less than $40,000, you have zero expected contribution to tuition, less than $60,000 a substantially reduced contribution.
I think that's a pretty huge move towards fairness, don't you?
Actually, if you're not wealthy, you're more likely to be able to afford an "elite" university tuition than you would a high-quality state university (assuming you are coming from out of state).
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and I'm pretty sure most of the other Ivies will offer a financial aid package that will fully cover the difference between what (the schools think) your family can pay and what tuition (and room and board) is. What the schools think your family can afford is almost always manageable. To make things even better, they put a cap on the amount the student loan will be a part of the financial aid package.
For example, there's no way my family and I could afford $34k a year for Harvard a few years ago. They offered me a financial aid package that was about $24k a year, and my final year (in '02-'03) the loan cap was about $2k a year (so final tuition was about $10k a year plus a $2k loan).
If you're a good high school student, don't look past the Ivies because you think you can't afford it. It may be much more affordable than you think.
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
Actually, many US Presidents have graduated from public schools or obscure private schools. Here's a list
Most recently: Reagen went to Eureka College, Carter to Georgia Tech, Ford to U of Michigan (Yale Law), Nixon to Whittier College (Duke Law), Lyndon Johnson to Southwest Texas State Teachers College.
Speaking from personal experience, not everyone gets an A at Harvard. And grade inflation, while it does exist (I got an A in an economics class where all I did was take the midterm and final, no classes, no homework), certainly does not exist in most of the computer science and engineering classes.
Otherwise, there's no advantage in engineering and the hard sciences.
I think an Ivy-league degree will give you an advantage in the very early process of finding a job (you're more likely to get an interview, for example), but once you go on your interview, the name on your degree matters much less.
That being said, hopefully what you learned at the Ivy League school will then help you blow them away at your interview.
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
A college degree in what? Frankly, with the exception of history or econ majors, I don't know what I'd do with graduate with a liberal arts major. I can plug someone with a science or engineering background into a lot of slots, but the share of US graduates in science, engineering, and mathematics has been in rapid decline for some time now. Maybe that's why you are seeing college grads in jobs you feel are beneath them.
You mean Stephen Wolfram? I thought he founded Wolfram Research to build Mathematica so he'd have the tools to work on his cellular automata, long after he graduated from Caltech, and worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, and eventually University of Illinois I guess not having to move would be a good reason, too. :-)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
The article doesn't say that companies are hiring fewer Ivy Leaguers. It says that fewer "C-level" (CEO, CFO, CIO, etc) execs went to an Ivy League school as an undergrad. Also, it is not like NONE of them are Ivy grads. The percentage dropped from 14% to 10%. This is still a LARGE number when you compare the enrollment size of the Ivy's with the size of the population at large. Based on this number, Ivy schools have a disproportionate representation in the board room, relative to their size.
:-)
Based upon the erroneous conclusions of the submitter and the author of the original article, I would say that both probably attended a public college.
------
www.moneybythenumbers.com
While the Ivies do play football (of a sort), the Ivy League is much more than a football league. The eight Ivy League schools, with MIT, do cooperate on issues like admissions, financial aid, etc. In years past the cooperation was extensive--enough so that the Federal Trade Commission sued alleging restraint of trade (since the Ivies would coordinate financial aid offers to prevent "bidding wars" for students).
One more thing that I didn't make clear in my original post: They offer this to everyone who the schools decide can't afford the full cost of tuition. There are no athletic scholarships (the Ivy League doesn't allow it), and Harvard, for one, does not give merit based scholarships either.
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!