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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?"
It's because they all get hired by Google these days. :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Could it be that other schools are becoming better as access to information increases?
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Maybe it's because they've realized George Bush not only attended, but actually graduated from an Ivy League School.
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Legacy graduates are destroying the integrity of the academic program and make a feudalism out of a supposed meritocracy.
Say what you will about GW Bush; the man is not an intellectual, but is an ivy league grad.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Or maybe it's the fact that there aren't any stable jobs at large companies anymore. Why spend the big bucks on the school when you'll have to change jobs every three years anyway. The article mentions it, but I can assure you that C-level executive positions usually last less than five years. The same is true for most other positions now, too.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Being alumni of the ivy I can say I have had no real advantage in the direct job market because of my school but the network that I was able to develop while at school is second to none.
There is a idiom of ivy arrogance that the only difference between the education you get at Harvard vs other schools is that at other schools you learn about history at Harvard you are taught by the people that made history and sitting in a room with others that will make history.
There is no such thing as a "stable" "job" anywhere in the United States today. You either work for someone else, in which case your job is only as stable as the next quarter's results (factoring out your personal performance), or you work for yourself with all the instability/risk that entails.
But the 1950s career ladder is gone.
sPh
For the average Ivy Leaguer, motivation and work ethic are exactly what got them admitted, and it's also motivation and work ethic that's required to do well in such a competitive environment.
However, I can tell you that at my school, as well as most of the others in the Ivy League, there is a discernible difference between those who had to work hard to get in and those who are of "legacy" status. Us public school educated kids aren't necessarily a rarity anymore, but we do come from quite different worlds.
Perhaps corporations are realizing that simply graduating from an Ivy League says little more about the person than graduating from any place else....you still want those who aren't at the bottom of their class, because, truth be told, it's nearly impossible to flunk out of an Ivy League school. Few people realize that when you have a poor semester at most of these schools, you go on "academic leave" for a semester to "get your head straight"...your old grades take a more permanent vacation.
Plastics.
According to the US Census, about 13 mil employed white males from 35 to 64 have a bachelors degree or greater.
There are 8 Ivy League universities, but let's be gracious and include schools like Stanford, MIT and Chicago and up the number of "top" schools to 12. Let's assume an average enrollment of apx 1,500 students per year per school between the years 1960 through 1990 (the years those white males went to school), leading to a total of 12 x 1,500 x 30 = 540,000 graduates and let's assume that 2/3 are male (it's only 1/2 nowadays), leading to apx 360,000 ivy leaguers out there.
This means that ivy leaguers make up apx. 2.8% of the eligible CxO candidate pool.
So, the conclusion is that having an ivy degree increases your odds of becoming a CxO by about 3.5x today instead of the 5x it did back in the day.
Of course, all this is meaningless drivel since they Ivy League is a *football* league, not some sort of academic standards association and, more importantly, as if increasingn a 0.002% chance to 0.007% means anything at all.
drop the r's, don't roll them, lengthen and soften the a's. it's more like haav'ad.
:)
the law of conservation of r's also states to place them where they do not normally exist, such as idea->ide'ar
hope this helps
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
So to say that education is less desirable than motivation and work ethic is a fallacy since it takes motivation and work ethic to get an education.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
In my opinion, Americans spend way too much effort getting into the 'best' schools. In the end, your personal achievments speak much louder than where you graduate from. Mediocre Harvard graduates are still mediocre; exceptional XX-State graduates are still exceptional.
By all means go to the school that will best enhance your personal talents. But don't stand on your head to be admitted to 'the' school, especially if this effort is contrary to developing your individual talents. Admission to university is a beginning, not an end.
First of all, it's unamerican to not make fun of the President. That's what sets us apart from other nations.
Second, people who whinges about making fun of GW were probably saying nasty things about Clinton, Gore and Kerry, so
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
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. =)
The corporations USED TO offer "stable, high-paying jobs", but now offer neither.
Pretty much everyone knows that there is no corporate loyalty to their employees anymore, and that you cannot expect to have a position next year EVEN if you do a great job (strategy changes, mergers, sales of divisions, etc.).
Corporate pay is no longer what it used to be either. Except for getting to the absolue top, you may live comfortably, but you will not get wealty on 4 decades of corporate pay. And they are getting better at extracting more work for less (real) pay -- its called increased productivity.
In contrast, there are now many examples of excellent success in entrepreneurship, and the better control over your lifestyle. So, if you were smart and had a top education and a choice, would you go be a wage slave for some corp? Maybe for a few years just to get a bit more background and maybe connections, but not for long. Pretty soon, you won't put up with the corp BS, and you'll choose a better lifestyle running your own show. Ergo, there are fewer Ivy-types available to rise into those positions
You mean "alumnus". "Alumni" is plural, but "alumnus" is singular.
You're missing some commas there.
There is a idiom of ivy arrogance that the only difference between the education you get at Harvard vs other schools is that at other schools you learn about history at Harvard you are taught by the people that made history and sitting in a room with others that will make history.
Gosh, where to start: "a idiom", missing commas, missing "while" before "at Harvard", no capitalization of "Ivy".
They would have thrown me out of CMU for writing like that. Is that another key difference between Harvard and non-Harvard education?
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.
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www.moneybythenumbers.com
I agree that the Ivy aura is fading fast. At least in technology.
14 years ago I was interviewing for my first software job and I hadn't even finished my degree at a public university. The interviewer told me, "You know, earlier today I interviewed a guy with a degree from Harvard. Tell me why I should hire you instead?" It was my first real interview and thinking about it now I think I did a poor job, but I gave him a copy of a small Quicken-like finance program I had written for my own use and told him that I thought I had real experience while the guy from Harvard probably just had theoretical experience.
I got the job.
So 14 years ago a high school graduate working on a degree from a public university beat out a Harvard graduate. And that was 14 years ago. When I later moved to a new country I responded to one job offer in the local paper by sending them my resume and a disk with some software I had written. I got the job even though I wasn't yet fluent in the local language.
It's not about where you spent 4 years of your life. It's about what you can do and whether you can provide the employer with any reason to believe that you can do the things you say you can do. If you can, you'll get the job and the Harvard grad will still be looking.
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).
I think the key is to seperate "education" from a "license to get a real job". There are two camps here, really two sides. Pursuing philosophy because you LOVE it, and it enraptures you and consumes you and becomes your life's passion... or computer science, or theoretical physics, or economics, or any other subject like that. Versus working hard to get a BS so that someone will hire you. Versus "you forget most of what you study anyway, it just proves to your employer that you are willing to work hard".
When you focus objectively on the subject, when you do what is called "deep learning", when you really get into what you are studying, and actually get your brain working, thinking new ideas, coming up with new questions, trying to find new answers, you begin to experience the true value of education, which is, if you asked me, about learning the material, understanding the significance of astronomy or physics or ethics or philosophy or literature or art or film, or politics, economics, etc...
I am from the camp that respects education because education is good in and of itself, intrinsically. I find education to be an end in and of itself, a way to improve yourself, question your place in society, learn more about the world you live in. I am not from the camp that feels that education is a "license" to get a job.
What we are probably seeing here is a reflection of these values - perhaps ivy leaguers are more likely to be passionate about education; perhaps they attach a significance to education that goes beyond the ability to get a job or proving that one is a hard worker.
If you think about it, at least at the undergraduate level, the stuff you learn and study has been studied and taught for hundreds, even thousands of years... there must be some compelling reason for this; and I can speak from personal experience that if you open your mind and really focus on "deep learning", really get into what you are studying, that it becomes quite obvious why we are still studying these subjects thousands of years later.
Education can be a very, very powerful tool; but you have to recognize that it has value in and of itself, and that it's not just a way to get a better job. Looking at it from this point of view, perhaps the figures make a little more sense. The types of environments that you will find in these big businesses probably make those positions less attractive to people who have a genuine, deep respect for education. Larger businesses will probably place more emphasis on a degree as a qualification or requirement, potential hires may be required to possess a BS as matter of policy.
Perhaps the path to getting the most out of education doesn't lead to C* positions at large organizations; and if getting the most out of life has anything to do with getting the most out of education, and if getting the most out of education has anything to do with respecting education as being important in and of itself, not simply a means to get a job, then you may very well see the positions in large corporations being filled with individuals who are open to accepting the viewpoint of education as a requirement, as a prerequisite to employment, with less emphasis on the intellectual and creative side of education, which usually requires money and time to pursue.
Actually, it isn't a decline in generalism, it's a decline in liberal arts degrees. If you really want a generalist, hire a physics major. Most liberal arts majors get almost no meaingful training in mathematics, or science. Mathematics and science background, and more importantly the kind of critical thinking they engender, is crucial today. Liberal arts majors don't have that.
I interview lots of job candidates. While specialization that will make them applicable to the problem their being hired for is a plus, it's not the deciding factor, because I will need to use them on something completely different in 6 months to a year. Adaptability is key. Quick learning is key. The ability to flesh out a hard technical problem and come up with an innovative solution to it is key. I've never seen anyone with a liberal arts degree who could do those things. I see physics, mathematics, biochem, and engineering people do them routinely.
The one kind of liberal arts major I've seen a general use for is history majors. They can pull together large quantities of scattered data and write a coherent explanation of what it all means. That's a niche, but it's a highly useful niche.