Where you go to college doesn’t matter. What you do when you get there does!

[Anonymous]

Not only is tuition high at elite privates, there are other expenses like bullhorns, lighter fluid, American flags, matches, picket sign materials, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Depends on firm. GS/BofA/JEFF all came to my top 10 undergrad to interview on campus….and many many many of us unconnected folks got jobs.

Obviously, the connected folks go through an entirely different pipeline, and for them it matters less where they went to school

There were 4193 Yale grads in 2023. How many of them are working in these jobs? Less than 2%? It is like winning a lifetime lottery.

Good stats here. Ground your debate in data.

https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-banking

Surprised by some of this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not only is tuition high at elite privates, there are other expenses like bullhorns, lighter fluid, American flags, matches, picket sign materials, etc.

Haha!!! So true. You should watch Bill Maher’s bit on the college kid’s “woke starter kit.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Forgot a few more:

Neighbor’s kid went to Harvard and majored in Philosophy. Yikes! He graduated a few years ago and moved to the PNW to be an “environmental educator” (whatever the hell that is) because he couldn’t get a real job post-grad.

But sometimes state school kids drop the ball. A friend’s DD is super smart. Turned down 3 Ivies for UMD on Banneker (donut family). She is majoring in Classics and English, and my friend told me that she wants to be an academic in the humanities. I told her that her DD should be prepared to not be able to find a job — the market for professors in the humanities is awful. And the kid wouldn’t even take my suggestion to at least minor in CS or Data Analytics (or anything useful!).

This child needs a Ph.D. before she knows whether she can make it. If she doesn't, she could teach in the public schools. It's a respectable job that has job security and great benefits, and there is opportunity to supplement teaching income with tutoring.

It would be sad to see such a bright girl end up as a public school teacher.

How sad that you feel that way. What could be more important than educating our kids?

+100. My kid has a few amazingly bright and dedicated public high school teachers and I am so grateful for them. It is a hard job and you can change the course of someone’s life.

[Anonymous]

Law/Business/Med School is the great cleanser. Who cares where you go undergrad? It's all how you do in professional school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Forgot a few more:

Neighbor’s kid went to Harvard and majored in Philosophy. Yikes! He graduated a few years ago and moved to the PNW to be an “environmental educator” (whatever the hell that is) because he couldn’t get a real job post-grad.

But sometimes state school kids drop the ball. A friend’s DD is super smart. Turned down 3 Ivies for UMD on Banneker (donut family). She is majoring in Classics and English, and my friend told me that she wants to be an academic in the humanities. I told her that her DD should be prepared to not be able to find a job — the market for professors in the humanities is awful. And the kid wouldn’t even take my suggestion to at least minor in CS or Data Analytics (or anything useful!).

It's great that some people follow paths that are not for you, OP. You should respect that. The world needs all sorts of professions in it. Why is everything about money for you? Are you THAT materialistic? Is it the only scale by which you measure people's worth? Did you marry for money, perchance? Are you only steering your kids towards professions that earn the most money?

And yet you're on here telling us that the type of college doesn't matter. But you think half the majors out there are crap.

Stop pretending you're open-minded. You're just a gold-digger.

Why is OP a gold digger? Did she say she was a bisexual 21 year old looking to marry one of these people?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I honestly don’t think school or GPA matters long term. I graduated a mediocre college with a 2.6 GPA other than hard to get first job out of school by 23 no one cared. I did a part time MBA at night company paid for got a 3.0 GPA bare minimum to graduate.

All companies care about is you have the degrees. I landed $350k to 400k jobs during career.

Today you can get a VP or SVP job with a felony conviction.

Biden went to Delaware and Trump Fordham neither good students I bet.

What is your job where you are making $350,000 to $400,000?

[Anonymous]

According to this latest Chetty/Deming/Friedman study, it DOES matter where you go to college:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/07/24/1189443223/affirmative-action-for-rich-kids-its-more-than-just-legacy-admissions

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I honestly don’t think school or GPA matters long term. I graduated a mediocre college with a 2.6 GPA other than hard to get first job out of school by 23 no one cared. I did a part time MBA at night company paid for got a 3.0 GPA bare minimum to graduate.

All companies care about is you have the degrees. I landed $350k to 400k jobs during career.

Today you can get a VP or SVP job with a felony conviction.

Biden went to Delaware and Trump Fordham neither good students I bet.

What is your job where you are making $350,000 to $400,000?

Not the poster you are questioning but I went to a commuter college. State school for grad school now run a nonprofit and make 350K base with 100K bonus potential and put away about 75K/yr into retirement with matching. I am very, very very lucky.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:According to this latest Chetty/Deming/Friedman study, it DOES matter where you go to college:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/07/24/1189443223/affirmative-action-for-rich-kids-its-more-than-just-legacy-admissions

I would agree that a better title for this thread would be “Where you go to college matters less than what you do when you get there” instead of not mattering at all. But I don’t think the above article is really about that. It’s about the very rich having an easier time getting in. There is one paragraph that talks about 12 schools being over-represented in certain high profile populations (eg, Supreme Court justices), but those are tiny groups. The largest of those groups is the Fortune 500 CEOs, where 90% didn’t go to one of the 12 for college. That’s actually higher than I for one would have guessed, so in some sense supports OP’s point. One problem with data on such small populations is the numbers can change quickly. My non-scientific impression is the trend over time is towards less over-representation by a small number of schools in most of the examples mentioned in the article (CEOs, congress members, Rhodes scholars…)

This topic was studied more directly by Dale & Krueger, who concluded that things like high school stats and where one applies (as opposed to where admitted or enrolled) were better predictors of later income than selectivity of school attended. There were exceptions for different demographic groups (certain minorities and low income families) who benefited more than others by attending a highly selective college, which perhaps is part of the reason schools saw fit to more aggressively pursue them.