Slashdot Mirror
Is Going To an Elite College Worth the Cost?
Pickens writes "Jacques Steinberg writes in the NY Times that the sluggish economy and rising costs of college have only intensified questions about whether expensive, prestigious colleges make any difference. Researchers say that alumni of the most selective colleges earn, on average, 40 percent more a year than those who graduated from the least selective public universities, as calculated 10 years after they graduated from and found that 'attendance at an elite private college significantly increases the probability of attending graduate school, and more specifically graduate school at a major research university.' But other researchers say the extent to which one takes advantage of the educational offerings of an institution may be more important, in the long run, than how prominently and proudly that institution's name is being displayed on the back windows of cars in the nation's wealthiest enclaves."
Its not about whether or not the degree you get there is any better if you email your CV to a company you found on a jobs site.
Its about if the preppy boy you shared a room with can get you a job at his dad's company.
If they're swayed by the big H on your resume, great! Maybe you'll be able to pay off your student loans slightly faster otherwise. Or you could just go to the much cheaper, less pretentious school and get the same degree without the financial insolvency. Your choice.
You should turn signatures off.
The article seems to assume that lots of folk attending elite schools are paying sticker for their education. From my understanding that's not the case.
With the move to substantially increase tuition at all universities in England, there will be growing comparison against the sticker price at the top US schools. That, of course, is an unfair comparison as top US schools while undoubtedly expensive also have exceptional financial aid packages.
While an in-state public university tuition will almost always be the most affordable, many will be able to attend top private schools for a similar amount. Very few will be paying the $45-50k talked about in the article.
Are they considering selection effects at all? Yes, those who go to Ivy league may earn that much more - but would the same people have earned that much less if they for some reason didn't?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
From what I have seen it is the close personal contacts among wealthy families that make the difference and not the actual education. There are not so many people that can make a few phone calls and bring heavy investment money into a situation. After all, how many people can invest multi-millions in any project? They tend to know each other and their family members have the path prepared for them due to endowments to old ivy.
Don't go take your under-graduate degree from a college that is famous for its graduate program, you will never see your professors, just their graduate student teaching assistants.
You should pick a school that is "known for" the program you are going to take at the level you are going to take it. That can be well worth it.
And the definition of famous needs to be curtailed. As some professionals in the field you intend to pursue whether what schools they "know are good". The answers to this are almost always rather surprising and often include some very good near-by or state schools.
Schools "earn their branding" for a reason, but you have to _really_ _check_ the brand details and you also have to make sure that it isn't expired. Only the professionals in the field will know if the school that is famous for X to the general populace is really sitll famous for X amongst the topical peerage.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Actually, I both agree and want to push this further.
Although he was phrasing it rather snarky, the AC elsewhere who said it was about the preppy contacts and schmoozing was part right - if you're a people-person and know how to be in the popular crowds, the Who-You-Know factor can be an instant ticket.
However, I treated a degree as "something to defend" and didn't want a glaring Scarlet Letter following me around. I agree that the undergrad experience in some of the Name Schools is awful and a borderline-scam. I switched to a state school and started on a mostly ordinary business career.
But Education is the next big Bubble. I was in Uni in a precisely dated "last of the old" time slots - 1993-1997. A typical undergrad course = 2 textbooks, "40 podcasts" and your choice of "2 answers per podcast + 1 office hour". Thanks to the RIAA's screaming, we now know that 40 podcasts = ... $0! And now the Two-Questions can be answered on the net. So the real price of the class is a $50/hour "consulting hour" plus the rent for the dorm + meal ticket.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Many of the most elite schools have a "legacy admissions" policy (that's how the C-student George W. Bush managed to get into Yale). It gives the children of alumni priority admission, because they want their richer alumni to keep contributing money, and denying little Biff or Muffy their admission would be bad business. It's affirmative action for the rich.
Would you like a hand to get off your very high horse sir?
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
Yes, you build up a network of contacts in the world of the most successful people. But that is important. But interacting with successful people does more than just give you "contacts"; there is inherently automatically a "mentoring" effect.
"But other researchers say the extent to which one takes advantage of the educational offerings of an institution may be more important, in the long run"
This is theoretically true at an individual level. If I think to my own days in a third-world mediocre public school and university, I would say I ultimately managed to get a good education 'in spite of' my school/university, not because of it --- but even so, I often performed very poorly (regretfully), and if I had to name THE single-biggest thing that negatively influenced my performance, I would have to say it was being surrounded by almost 100% uniformly poor-performing peers; they were stupid, they were lazy, they didn't care, learning was the least important thing imaginable, and stupidity and laziness was basically celebrated. When 99.9% of a child's peers are like that, as happened with me, it is almost impossible not to be negatively influenced and 'dragged down' to some degree.
Now, many years later, I have a baby on the way, and have to start thinking about where to send her someday. And I definitely feel that if I can afford it, I want her in one of the top-notch universities. Why? Not because I'm expecting miracles from the professors or infrastructure, but because I know she is most likely to be surrounded by a comparatively higher percentage of peers who are amongst those in society with the highest focus and motivation on hard work and success.
It is oddly seldom mentioned, but beyond parenting and teachers, I think the quality of peers that your child sits with must have a huge influence on their outcomes.
The other reason is that I indeed want my children to mingle with society's successful people, not just to build contacts, but because there is an inherent mentoring effect. Even spending a day with someone highly successful at something can make a young persons entire career. The most successful people in finance and investing, tend to have had top-notch mentors, and you can mostly only find those people in the upper echelons.
Like it or not, many of the most successful IT entrepreneurs etc. do come from backgrounds that allowed them to attend top-notch universities, and there are reasons for that.
Can children be successful in cheaper schools, sure, of course, but suddenly when parenthood looms I just think I want the statistically best chance for my kids, so they can have opportunities I never had.
Well, it's more about the opportunities than anything else.
Many of the top tier firms (particularly in certain industries like management consulting or high finance) will not hire from regular colleges, unless you are a rock star. In which case, it isn't the college that does it anyway, it is the individual.
You go to a top school, you work at a top firm, you get admitted into a top school for your MBA, you get into an executive position. Having a pedigree just makes it a lot easier, that is all.
This is just as true for other areas such as law or medicine - and less so in the sciences or engineering.
You'd also be surprised at the amount of general opportunities that come your way at a top school, giving you way more avenues to succeed in life. For instance, just a couple of weeks ago, Harvard had the Masquerade Ball, where students and alumni from Harvard came together - what do you think happens at such events? Networking and schmoozing.
As other people have noted, people attending top schools may be more successful financially and professionally, but they also tend to be smart, hardworking, and come from affluent backgrounds. Those qualities are probably more important predictors of success than the education itself. The article mentions a Princeton economist who found that kids who were admitted to elite schools, but who turned them down to to attend other institutions, did about as well as those actually attending.
That being said, don't discount the importance of the name. A prof once told me "the name will help you get in the door for the interview, but once you're inside, it's all about you". He meant to emphasize that it's ultimately about the person, not the institution. True, but if you can't solve the immediate problem of getting that interview, your qualifications don't really matter, and in a lot of fields its difficult to even get an interview. Simply being able to get into a good school implies that you have a lot of the qualities- motivation, work ethic, intelligence- that people want. They're more likely to read your application carefully and call you. Maybe that's not fair, but that's the way it is. The name opens doors.
Personally, I think good schools really are worth it; the top institutions really are different. But keep in mind that the "best" school according to U.S. News and World Report is not necessarily the "best" school for you. Different schools have different cultures and you might find yourself fitting in perfectly at one, and miserable at the other. Maybe you prefer a school where people are passing out drunk and vomiting in the halls, or maybe you want a school where people hang out in the halls arguing about programming languages. Maybe you want a school with an amazing English program, maybe you want one with an amazing philosophy program. Maybe you want to go to a huge school in New York City, maybe you want to go to a small college in a college town. It's more important to go to the school that's best for you, than the one that's ranked #1 this year.
But the most important thing to keep in mind is this: you can get a good education anywhere, if you work hard, and a lousy education anywhere, if you don't.
While it is a great story, and I'm happy you are having a good life. You have a survivorship bias. I don't believe your story would be reflective of a random sample of individuals who didn't graduate from High school. You don't have to graduate high school and college in order to be successful in life, but doing so increases the rate of success.
As Walter Benn Michaels puts it in "The Trouble with Diversity," universities are where the rich send their children, in order to "launder their privilege into qualifications." What a great phrase!
The USA claims to be a free and open society, where anyone can, through natural talent and hard work, rise to a higher class, and become wealthy and influential. But of course that's a lie. Social classes exist here just as they do in all countries, and the rich upper classes will always remain dominant, the poor you will always have with you, and the middle class will always be insecure and will strive to move into the upper class. It's not different here, it's just that we've been sold on the myth of equal opportunity.
Because of this lie, the rich have to hide their inherited advantages, and must show evidence that they actually have talents and are hard-working. Middle-class workers have to be kept asleep, lest they realize that the people who own the corporation do so through wealth, and not through merit. Hence the corporate owners send their kids to Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford, to mask that inherited privilege with the trappings of actual skill and effort.
I've walked through the campus at Princeton, and the undergraduates there all appeared to float through space, as if life had never presented them with any obstacles, as if anything was possible, as if the future held great delights. They weren't snobbish. They were very nice people, but they truly knew that they were masters of their universe.
So how does this relate to the NY times article in question? Why do private-university graduates have higher salaries than state-university graduates? Simply because they are rich and connected *BEFORE* they enter the hallowed halls. That wealth and advantage are there after they graduate, and helps them land great jobs. They would probably land those jobs if they didn't attend those schools, but then the resentful middle-class workers would smell a rat.
In other words, the school you attend makes no difference. What matters is what class you were born into.
Sounds nice but a couple of things:
First, you're in systems. There really isn't much at universities involving systems that isn't mostly lost on anyone who's not a straight up EE. Most successful systems people can get to a reputable position in the field with a few certs and a good work ethic. Which brings up the question; what certs do you have, if any? How long did it take you to get them and how much did it cost? Not that even a full battery of decent certs are going to cost as much or take as long but the education value of a cert over a degree is fairly limited. This is a known.
Next, you're a lucky fellow. I'm sure you worked hard and not to take the away from you but most guys who take on the systems role with no schooling behind them end up working shit like the Geek Squad. 30-40k a year, mostly dead end jobs if not just a contractor, not much to play with outside of more systems work, no real way to make connections that can lead to better things in the company outside of their field if they decide to... in short, thanks but no thanks. While you may be the kick ass "geek" that your friends turn to when they get a nasty virus or their CD-ROM stops working there isn't much glory or maneuverability in the field.
Third, if you're super lucky and you belong to a large organization you can work your way into middle management and there isn't a non-IT middle manager who'll take you seriously. It's largely a thankless job. Those who attempt this track of advancement who fail end up risking even a worse fate: help desk. The large structures in question normally won't hire non-experienced people outside of the help desk hell. These people will be promised up and down about opportunities and while a motivated person will advance in time it is all too easy to become disillusioned and end up being a drone during the best working years of your life. That's a fate that will haunt you through out an IT career.
You did well and I congratulate you but please don't go around acting like your story is the basis of a realistic career path that others can take up. I've known tons of people who've taken your route, some even have associates and bachelors degrees to lean on and most of them are miserable, over worked and under paid. Not to mention that while you got away with having a life free of student loans, you've also missed out on the college culture. Which, if you're any kind of social person, can be not only a great time but help you learn a lot about the society around you.
You provide a link to the study, but not to any results supporting your claim. The only results I found with a bit of searching were in an Atlantic Monthly article -- and those indicated that personal relationships were most important, but only among the Harvard men studied, not the "Glueck men", for whom the most important predictor was industriousness in childhood. Further, there were other factors as well, for both groups.
Americans ideals tend to favor the individual over the group. This is likely due to the fact that the US was founded (or at least developed) by rugged individualists who favored ideas like self-reliance, free will, self-determination, upward mobility within as single generation, and at least the perception of a meritocracy. Wrong, right or in between a highly structured system where a kid must move down a specific track for his educational career largely runs counter to those ideas and is seen as removing opportunity from those who make mistakes early in life or who do not have the opportunities due to socio-economic or other constraints. Hence things like tracks which allow you to get educated versus tracks where you get vocational training is looked down upon as anathema to the American ideals of equality and opportunity here. As a result it's unlikely you'll see something like you're proposing over here anytime soon though it is often discussed in educational circles.
To answer your question about the SAT it's just a standardized test to see what a kid has learned. It's a way of comparing kids from vastly different backgrounds and educational experiences on a standard scale. It doesn't take into account things like experiences or whether the kid performed community service or played a leadership role in school just his or her knowledge. We send in what amounts to a resume (i.e. CV) along with our test scores and high school transcripts to cover that other stuff when we apply to college.