What an Ivy league education gets you - the Atlantic

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are a bunch of new ivies including Emory, Vandy, Rice. They can simulate a similar environment.

Ha, nope. Look at parchment match ups, while those are great schools, they are full of kids who didn't get into an Ivy and would have picked it if they had.

We did
Emory vs Dartmouth
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Emory+University&with=Dartmouth+


Rice vs Cornell
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Rice+University&with=Cornell+

Vanderbilt vs Cornell
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Vanderbilt+University&with=Cornell+University

Parchment isn't 100% reliable nor representative of all of the students who had these choices. Nobody is picking Emory over Cornell.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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+.

This PP managed to write a super long post about Ivies’ superior test scores without mentioning the school with the best scores: Harvey Mudd, which coincidentally also has the highest post-undergrad starting salary.

Ivies are now 50-60+% athletes, legacies, VIPs/donors and first-gen/low income; overwhelming majority of them could not survive HM’s 1st year core requirements let alone 4 years.

Drop the Mudd nonsense, it's a great school but nothing special relative to the Ivy+ or a dozen other SLACs. It's a bunch of engineers which his why their undergrad starting salary is high. It will stay high too but if you look at mid-career salaries it's tail is likely quite different than that of the top NESCAC SLACs and CMC because they don't send many kids into IB, top consulting and big law which is where the later career stage money is.

The PP wrote a novel without saying anything substantive. Yes, the tails might look a bit different among the schools but the overlap is huge. And somehow in their world there is a significant difference between 97th percentile and the 98th but the world and admissions knows that it isn't true. There are over 60,000 kids with 97%+ scores every year and they have to go somewhere. The idea that somehow only the T10 create critical mass is dim at best.

The study that is referenced is also misleading. The reason for the additional movement into the top 1% can virtually entirely be attributed to career gatekeeping. Access to IB, MBB, big law careers is what gets people into the top 1% and access is highly restricted to a certain set of schools. If you back those careers out of the data set I suspect you would see a reversion to mean for top 1% achievement. That means there are about 20 top schools SLACs and Universities which will drive overperformance when it comes to reaching the top 1%. Research using proxies like F1000 board seats per capita strongly supports this hypothesis as well.

Great but bamboo ceiling is real plus competent kids should start their own companies for that elite colleges matter less.

Actually, the opposite is even more true. Elite school dropouts and grads have a far easier time raising capital vs all others.

The last Y Combinator class was over 85% from just like 15 schools.

Doesn't mean you can't if you don't attend expensive schools, point is that is not a must. Everything is about opportunity cost.

Well, sure nothing stops anyone from trying, even someone who never finished 5th grade (honestly, VCs love crazy stories, so maybe that does help if you were able to get a meeting).

However PP said it matters less…and that’s just not the case.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are a bunch of new ivies including Emory, Vandy, Rice. They can simulate a similar environment.

Ha, nope. Look at parchment match ups, while those are great schools, they are full of kids who didn't get into an Ivy and would have picked it if they had.

We did
Emory vs Dartmouth
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Emory+University&with=Dartmouth+


Rice vs Cornell
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Rice+University&with=Cornell+

Vanderbilt vs Cornell
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Vanderbilt+University&with=Cornell+University

Parchment isn't 100% reliable nor representative of all of the students who had these choices. Nobody is picking Emory over Cornell.

At the very least…only the Parchment numbers that are colored red and green are even relevant…anything grey scale doesn’t have enough data to produce a result.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To be rich all you need is basic good math to gamble in stock market, many people do it without expensive elite school education lol

Says someone without basic common sense. Why is DCUM so dumb? It’s just beyond my imagination.

Yeah well doesn't matter money is everything even if you dumb ha ha ha

Go embrace your expensive education equate intelligence bs noble person

[Anonymous]

I went to an Ivy from a NYC private. I didn't find the people at college as intense and driven as the people in high school, on the whole, but for me that was a good thing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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+.

This PP managed to write a super long post about Ivies’ superior test scores without mentioning the school with the best scores: Harvey Mudd, which coincidentally also has the highest post-undergrad starting salary.

Ivies are now 50-60+% athletes, legacies, VIPs/donors and first-gen/low income; overwhelming majority of them could not survive HM’s 1st year core requirements let alone 4 years.

Drop the Mudd nonsense, it's a great school but nothing special relative to the Ivy+ or a dozen other SLACs. It's a bunch of engineers which his why their undergrad starting salary is high. It will stay high too but if you look at mid-career salaries it's tail is likely quite different than that of the top NESCAC SLACs and CMC because they don't send many kids into IB, top consulting and big law which is where the later career stage money is.

The PP wrote a novel without saying anything substantive. Yes, the tails might look a bit different among the schools but the overlap is huge. And somehow in their world there is a significant difference between 97th percentile and the 98th but the world and admissions knows that it isn't true. There are over 60,000 kids with 97%+ scores every year and they have to go somewhere. The idea that somehow only the T10 create critical mass is dim at best.

The study that is referenced is also misleading. The reason for the additional movement into the top 1% can virtually entirely be attributed to career gatekeeping. Access to IB, MBB, big law careers is what gets people into the top 1% and access is highly restricted to a certain set of schools. If you back those careers out of the data set I suspect you would see a reversion to mean for top 1% achievement. That means there are about 20 top schools SLACs and Universities which will drive overperformance when it comes to reaching the top 1%. Research using proxies like F1000 board seats per capita strongly supports this hypothesis as well.

Great but bamboo ceiling is real plus competent kids should start their own companies for that elite colleges matter less.

Actually, the opposite is even more true. Elite school dropouts and grads have a far easier time raising capital vs all others.

The last Y Combinator class was over 85% from just like 15 schools.

Doesn't mean you can't if you don't attend expensive schools, point is that is not a must. Everything is about opportunity cost.

Well, sure nothing stops anyone from trying, even someone who never finished 5th grade (honestly, VCs love crazy stories, so maybe that does help if you were able to get a meeting).

However PP said it matters less…and that’s just not the case.

You are right I see more and more lower class people push their kids through cheaper community college by age 12 to be a lawyer before age 20

Speaking of VC there are globally 240 cities offer VC and startup opportunities lot of opportunities not just in the US

[Anonymous]

Embracing your LV bag education if it's so good no reason to spend big marketing efforts isn't it

Tired of endless justification of these worth it or not

Basic critical thinking and individual choices

[Anonymous]

The article shouldn't have framed things as an Ivy League bonus. You get the same results from MIT, Rice, Northwestern, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Duke, CalTech, Chicago and Williams. Not to mention West Point and Annapolis.

Smart people in smart environments surrounded by smart people beget good things. News at 11.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The article shouldn't have framed things as an Ivy League bonus. You get the same results from MIT, Rice, Northwestern, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Duke, CalTech, Chicago and Williams. Not to mention West Point and Annapolis.

Smart people in smart environments surrounded by smart people beget good things. News at 11.

Define smart people

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are a bunch of new ivies including Emory, Vandy, Rice. They can simulate a similar environment.

Ha, nope. Look at parchment match ups, while those are great schools, they are full of kids who didn't get into an Ivy and would have picked it if they had.

We did
Emory vs Dartmouth
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Emory+University&with=Dartmouth+


Rice vs Cornell
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Rice+University&with=Cornell+

Vanderbilt vs Cornell
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Vanderbilt+University&with=Cornell+University

Parchment isn't 100% reliable nor representative of all of the students who had these choices. Nobody is picking Emory over Cornell.

Plenty on reddit said they did or are doing just that. There is a dcum thread a few days ago about Cornell vs Emory Oxford.
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Emory&with=Cornell

So we only use parchment until it disagrees with your viewpoint?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are a bunch of new ivies including Emory, Vandy, Rice. They can simulate a similar environment.

Ha, nope. Look at parchment match ups, while those are great schools, they are full of kids who didn't get into an Ivy and would have picked it if they had.

We did
Emory vs Dartmouth
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Emory+University&with=Dartmouth+


Rice vs Cornell
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Rice+University&with=Cornell+

Vanderbilt vs Cornell
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Vanderbilt+University&with=Cornell+University

Parchment isn't 100% reliable nor representative of all of the students who had these choices. Nobody is picking Emory over Cornell.

At the very least…only the Parchment numbers that are colored red and green are even relevant…anything grey scale doesn’t have enough data to produce a result.

No thats not true at all. The numbers are too close together for there to be green and red. How would you color coded 50/50?
If parchment doesnt have enough data for two schools it looks like this...
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Emory+University&with=Swarthmore+

[Anonymous]

The only real information I glean from this study is how opportunity and inequality work at the very top of higher education and that these schools do not admit students based purely on merit. Nothing surprising.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are a bunch of new ivies including Emory, Vandy, Rice. They can simulate a similar environment.

Ha, nope. Look at parchment match ups, while those are great schools, they are full of kids who didn't get into an Ivy and would have picked it if they had.

We did
Emory vs Dartmouth
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Emory+University&with=Dartmouth+


Rice vs Cornell
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Rice+University&with=Cornell+

Vanderbilt vs Cornell
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Vanderbilt+University&with=Cornell+University

Parchment isn't 100% reliable nor representative of all of the students who had these choices. Nobody is picking Emory over Cornell.

Plenty on reddit said they did or are doing just that. There is a dcum thread a few days ago about Cornell vs Emory Oxford.
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Emory&with=Cornell

So we only use parchment until it disagrees with your viewpoint?

I just don't use Parchment, period. Sample size is often too small and biased. If way more students submitted data, then I would rely on it more.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are a bunch of new ivies including Emory, Vandy, Rice. They can simulate a similar environment.

Ha, nope. Look at parchment match ups, while those are great schools, they are full of kids who didn't get into an Ivy and would have picked it if they had.

We did
Emory vs Dartmouth
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Emory+University&with=Dartmouth+


Rice vs Cornell
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Rice+University&with=Cornell+

Vanderbilt vs Cornell
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Vanderbilt+University&with=Cornell+University

Parchment isn't 100% reliable nor representative of all of the students who had these choices. Nobody is picking Emory over Cornell.

At the very least…only the Parchment numbers that are colored red and green are even relevant…anything grey scale doesn’t have enough data to produce a result.

No thats not true at all. The numbers are too close together for there to be green and red. How would you color coded 50/50?
If parchment doesnt have enough data for two schools it looks like this...
https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Emory+University&with=Swarthmore+

This is what parchment says:

If the results are in color, then the difference is statistically significant at a 95% confidence level.

When I click on your links it says they don’t really have much of anything to produce results.

It has nothing to do with the greyscale percentages.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/ivy-league-education-income/686682/?gift=2104cHYqEyxQuK2PwywZF7-YEJE1w30W8CBwJeAa-x4

New research dropped - yes, elite schools matter

- Students at Ivy League schools and the similarly selective University of Chicago, Duke, Stanford, and MIT together comprise less than half a percent of America’s undergraduate population. Yet their alumni represent more than 12 percent of all Fortune 500 CEOs, 32 percent of all New York Times journalists, and 13 percent of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of the population.

- the most important thing a student gets from an Ivy Plus education isn’t instruction or prestige or even connections. It’s the opportunity to learn how to succeed in an environment filled with the world’s most talented and ambitious people. “Being in the classroom with all these folks, doing homework assignments, having to cooperate with them in your club, sitting around the dining table with them, figuring out who’s going to live with whom—all that stuff comes together to make these schools really unparalleled training grounds to be in these upper-echelon professional jobs

- it’s worth every penny.

- economists used a clever study design. They looked only at applicants who were wait-listed. The ones who ultimately were admitted were virtually indistinguishable from the ones who weren’t, meaning that the first group’s superior career performance was almost certainly caused by attending the more selective school. “Sending someone to an Ivy Plus school instead of to one of these top flagship schools is per se a transformational opportunity,” Friedman said. “It’s not that they were always on that path to begin with.”

- that the most important thing about top colleges is the people who attend them—and the transformation that occurs when a critical mass of such high-achieving people are put together in one place. That young people’s peers affect their life trajectories is well established. Chetty’s research has found that “economic connectedness”—people forming friendships across class lines—is one of the strongest predictors of upward mobility.

- he thinks that what’s going on is more complex and harder to define: an implicit education in how to succeed in an environment full of some of the world’s most gifted, determined people. There’s no class that can really teach someone how to collaborate in a highly competitive environment or emerge as a leader among their peers. “It’s very difficult to develop this leadership skill without the opportunity to be in a community with lots of other ambitious and talented individuals, which is exactly what the Ivy Plus schools are providing,” Friedman said. Steel sharpens steel.

- The hypothesis is that exposure, not just to so many great students, but in such a compact space—that’s really what makes these Ivy Plus and other highly selective schools stand out in ways that are even different from those top flagship schools,” Friedman said.

BS article. I know people who did not attend Ivy League schools but they are with the 1%. And there are plenty.