What an Ivy league education gets you - the Atlantic

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I did some back and forth with several AI engines, and I left even less impressed with the DCUM Ivy focus. The typical job for an Ivy grad is something in finance, consulting, or tech. It’s a job. It has a salary. But, many kids get this from a good school.

The students who go on to become standout alumni fall into one of several buckets:

1) They already had access to capital and networks before they arrived at school. The degree confirmed their birthright.

2) Ivy was a FIRST step among many to success, like a prestigious job, then a prestigious graduate degree, then another prestigious job, and then many years of hard work, and then they got the prize.

3) They were risk takers. Four of the wealthiest people in the US attended an Ivy and dropped out. It definitely wasn’t the education that determined their success. Other notables didn’t follow the safe path of the prestigious job, but ran for office, wrote a book, etc.

Whatever the case, only 1 in 50,000 Ivy dudes will become a CEO, and it’s hard to know if it was their Ivy degree, jobs after school, graduate education, or something else that got them there. Whatever the case, it’s clear that most Ivy students won’t be CEOs.

The takeaway is that while kids who attend Ivies are smart and probably more ambitious and competitive than most, only a fraction of even them have the insatiable ambition and drive to actively leverage the available network to make an outstanding difference.

For what it’s worth, I have a SIL who attended an Ivy undergraduate and Ivy medical school. She complains all the time about how her non-Ivy peers get paid the same money.

Why did your SIL choose an equitable field rather than a prestige sensitive one like high finance, consulting, etc?

The study in question didn't just look at a handful of CEOs, but the much larger portion making big money.

Don't you think big money's kind of useless if you have to pay 4x more for your nice big house? All the areas with prestige jobs have apartments and houses in the $1M+ range in the "good neighborhoods". A lot of them have life-draining commutes as well.

[Anonymous]

If people are interested in this topic they should read the actual paper rather than an article searching for clicks. It contains some important caveats and nuance.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31492

For example, the relative increases mentioned are large but in absolute terms are still fairly small (chance of reaching top 1% earnings increases from 11.8% at highly selective publics to 16.8% at Ivy-plus and elite grad school goes from 6.1% to 11.7%, for example). Some other measures of income don’t show the same result. And, importantly, the main driver seems to be academic aptitude, especially test scores, with no relationship or a negative one with other factors like legacy or non-academic credentials.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If people are interested in this topic they should read the actual paper rather than an article searching for clicks. It contains some important caveats and nuance.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31492

For example, the relative increases mentioned are large but in absolute terms are still fairly small (chance of reaching top 1% earnings increases from 11.8% at highly selective publics to 16.8% at Ivy-plus and elite grad school goes from 6.1% to 11.7%, for example). Some other measures of income don’t show the same result. And, importantly, the main driver seems to be academic aptitude, especially test scores, with no relationship or a negative one with other factors like legacy or non-academic credentials.

Almost double the chance is notable. Being in the mix with the highest concentration of super-smart motivated peers relates more to this metric than the jobs one. Jobs relate more to the top companies actively recruiting at ivy+. Top grad/professional schools has more to do with the peer motivation, though top faculty connections come in play. Then again income relates to grad/professional admissions. The average MD makes top 2% income, T14 law makes around the same. When a barely above average student at an ivy has over 90% chance of being admitted to at least one MD program in the US and a 75% chance at at least one T14, that is an impressive outcome, and one that relates more to the general ivy-student population than the very top.

[Anonymous]

I'm sure this has been said many times upthread - I haven't read.

But many of the kids attending these schools are born on 3rd based. They were going to be successful wherever they went. Getting into these schools is just a feature of their privilege.

[Anonymous]

It's true. I went to an Ivy and I'm a Fortune 500 CEO.

Everyone should send their kid to an Ivy 25 years ago so they can be a Fortune 500 CEO too!

Look at Sundae Pichai, Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang, Tim Cook...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:And income disparity just continues to widen.

Top colleges are more economically diverse than ever.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It doesn’t prove Ivy League schools matter. You can argue it’s the high student caliber in those schools that led to the results.

You didn't even bother to read the highlighted text in the OP did you?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Correlation =/= causation, dummy.

This is pretty good as far as social sciences go

[Anonymous]

The endless Ivy vs. the rest of 'em debate. At this stage if a corporate career, I have worked with people from every school imaginable. Please explain to me how the Ivy grads stand out in meetings? Calls? Work quality? You can't tell them apart from other staff. In fact, I see the opposite effect. People with a chip on their shoulder want to show they are better than them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It doesn’t prove Ivy League schools matter. You can argue it’s the high student caliber in those schools that led to the results.

This is the reason for the waitlist design, but I agree would be stronger if it was admitted students who decided to go elsewhere. I believe there IS a.study like that but its older (90s?) and showed no effect of attendance choice. The landscape may have changed since then though.

That study l only looked a at average outcomes.

By that metric Stevens institute of technology does better than Yale. This study seems to be trying to measure the frequency of very tail end results.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm sure this has been said many times upthread - I haven't read.

But many of the kids attending these schools are born on 3rd based. They were going to be successful wherever they went. Getting into these schools is just a feature of their privilege.

+1000. The students I know who are attending these schools are already extremely wealthy and definitely not the brightest.

[Anonymous]

I guess if you think being rich is the most important thing in life, going to an Ivy matters.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The study findings are what I intuitively would have said was the thing an elite institution gets you. I was a small town girl from a MC high school. Living in a dorm with heiresses and UMC girls acclimated me to the life I lived "ever after."

I would say the same but with regard to academic and intellectual firepower rather than lifestyle factors.

I managed to get to a T10 school without working hard or challenging myself much in high school. I knew I was very smart, so though I engaged when I wanted to, I mostly coasted through.

My T10 college changed that immediately. The environment stimulated and challenged me - to dig deeper, work harder, and push myself to the learning edge again and again. The discourse was more complex and sophisticated, and the “average” performance was astronomical compared to my previous environments. My classmates were truely impressive, and being around them helped me grow more than any concept or material I learned in a book or from a lecture.

It’s always about the people. Our peers help frame our daily lives and influence us so much more than we often realize.

And you get the exact same peer profile at another 20 or so universities and dozen or so SLACs.

No, you do not. The ivy+ schools as well as a couple of others JHU, Caltech, CMU, Rice, WashU, Vanderbilt all had roughly 75%* or more with 98-99%ile scores, based on matriculated students in the pre-TO years. Williams was in this range, Amherst and Swarthmore a little lower, more like 50% with 98-99%ile scores, similar to Northwestern, Notre Dame and a few others, by the time you get to the 25th best SAT range it was more like 25% of the class in the 98-99%ile range: ie UVA, Georgetown, Emory, and many SLACs between #5 and 13, some of those start to drop even lower.
Having 75% of the class at 98-99%ile is not at all the same as 25%.
Time will tell but now that almost all are back to test required, the same players will likely be up at the top again, ivies plus 7-10 more schools, presumably Williams will remain the top LAC for this stat.
Vanderbilt has moved away from caring about scores, they may not remain in that group as they once were. They used to brag at info sessions and post score tables showing only 4 ivies were higher than their ranges.
SAT scores are of course not the only indicators of a driven, motivated peer group. Vanderbilt for one used to take top-scoring kids who did not quite have top-10% grades from the private schools and top public magnet in our area: maybe Vanderbilt never

TLDR there are not 30 unis and 12 SLACs that have equivalent peers to the ivy+ schools studied. There are maybe 5-8 more in addition to the 12 studied. By the time you get to the 30th uni and 12th SLAC the talent is significantly diluted.

*Cornell was always the lowest, with about 50% 98-99%ile, likely related to the in-state admissions for CALS. Chicago and Columbia never used to report. Presumably they were lower than many peers in the ivy+.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm sure this has been said many times upthread - I haven't read.

But many of the kids attending these schools are born on 3rd based. They were going to be successful wherever they went. Getting into these schools is just a feature of their privilege

+1000. The students I know who are attending these schools are already extremely wealthy and definitely not the brightest.

When about 60% of ivy students are on need-based aid, for at least the past 3 cycles, you argument does not hold.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It doesn’t prove Ivy League schools matter. You can argue it’s the high student caliber in those schools that led to the results.

That has been studied, multiple times, comparing the group of students who had the choice and picked ivy+ MIT/Stanford/Duke /Chicago versus those who picked lower ranked schools. For the most competitive sectors of various fields, the ivy+ schools gave a small but statistically significant boost.

Until you control for family income and education. In those cases it's pretty negligible except in cases of kids going from poverty to ivy--but there's not a huge control group because those kids will get full rides anywhere so there isn't a huge comparison group at flagships.

For UMC kids, not much difference.

Oh yes there is. You have to have one at an ivy and one at a good public or good LAC to see it. It is night and day.

Yep. Most people lack the perspective to see the difference. There is a pretty big gap Harvard to Duke but the Duke crowd seems happier less string out.