Do elite schools actually matter? Besides prestige and connections, what are the pros? |
I have heard from parents of MIT kids of them getting summer research internship and earning 50K over 3 months which pretty much covers the difference between in-state and out of state tuition (MIT does not give any merit based scholarship since it is pretty much the whole school; only need based scholarship). After graduation I have seen them earning twice more than my salary after 20 years of exp in IT. Lot of T20 school kids end up starting their own startups as well with their classmates. There is a reason why students and parents (like us) crave for top schools. |
How do you know it’s the institution and not the kid? |
A common factor of elite schools in the T20 other than the Publics is the really low student to faculty ratio ( of 6 to 7), on par with the Top LACs or even better (MIT is 3). The Publics like UCLA, UCB are at 19. |
Quality of the peer group is vastly different vs. non T20 IMO. |
This. The networking. The connections. The opportunities. I went to a T-20 in the 90s and my siblings did not. There’s a huge divergence in earnings and peer group (my college friends and their outcomes compared to theirs)…. |
With holistic admissions and current preferences for athletes, first gen and pell grant eligible, this is not true, Lots if kids at T50 or even T75 who have stats for T20 but didn’t get in due to the aforementioned preferences, were hurt by average ecs, or college’s desire for geographical diversity. |
Career outcomes and wealth. |
The issue is do these kids ever get the jobs at Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, McKinsey, Bain in the numbers - on a per capita basis - compared to the top 25 schools? The answer is they don’t. At least not yet. Maybe that will change in the next decade. |
Here we go again. Yo people are insane. |
The quality of the kid might be more similar. But what firms are actually hiring from there? And what percentage of their starting first year analyst class is coming from a T75? I’d argue very few. At the end of the day that’s what matters. All of the other stuff on this website is nonsense. |
Why? This isn’t a crazy thing to want to know. |
graduating from IVY's matter if you want government policy job. |
Well, that only matters for the sliver of the class interested in private equity or investment banking, so really not that relevant for most. |
Not really, grad school will matter more. |