Why is it so hard to accept that the students at better colleges are simply better students?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No one is disputing that top colleges have better students than ones like the college you describe. But I DO question whether there is any meaningful difference between students at a, say, top 15 vs the students at somewhere 50-75. If there is, it’s not nearly as much as people on here seem to think.

+1 Absolutely the kids that get into more highly ranked colleges (which is what I think OP means by "better colleges") are excellent at doing school in the way that those schools want to see it done. And, obviously there is a difference between a T15 and a school with a sub-20% graduation rate and predominantly C-students. But the range of schools that have a good concentration of strong students and do a decent job of graduating them in 4 years goes well beyond the uber-selective. People so invested in their kids going to the very top tier schools seem to fall into thinking that it's that or ruin. Steadfastly ignoring the fact that they are surrounded by people who went to a wide range of colleges and are doing well in life.

You absolutely should pay attention to things like graduation rate, retention rate, share of the student body that were in the top x% of their class (My DD is in the top 25% so I tend to pay attention to that in looking at common data sets). I care about that data but I did not spend time looking at rankings. Beyond those actually relevant points, much of USNWR is based on measures of institutional wealth and things like surveys that just serve to replicate the existing rankings. And anyway, my kid is a good student but definitely not elite so why should we expect her to go a school with a sub 25% acceptance rate?

As someone who hires interns and entry-level employees, my focus is on what they did in school -- classes, projects, prior internships. I see and hire good candidates from a wide range of schools. I've had great and so-so hires from Ivies as well as public Us. Being a great student doesn't always translate into being great at a specific job.

[Anonymous]

I’ve worked with too many unimpressive yet simultaneously arrogant top 20 grads over the years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Okay but why should I, as an employer, GAF who is the best student? I don’t have any jobs for studying and taking tests. I need to know who is the best project manager and best salesperson and best communicator. Mind you, I do think student quality has some overlap with the skills I’m looking for, but you’re the one talking about the “best students.”

I find the obsession over where a person spends 4 years of their life really odd. Especially in the DMV, people seem to take more about predictors of success than actual… success.

And before you accuse me of being a naive populist, I went to Northwestern.

The easiest way for you, as an employer, to determine who is the best manager / salesperson / communicator would be to administer some type of IQ or aptitude test to job applicants. But you're not allowed to do that thanks to Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971). Therefore, you, like all employers, are forced to use proxies to achieve the same effect. The leading proxy for ability to do the job is, of course, "what degree do you have and where did you get it from". That may not be optimal from an employer's perspective but here we are.

LOL!!!!!!!!

You don't like it, but degrees are pretty much the only thing employers have to judge qualities that make for good employees, eg, conscientiousness.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Okay but why should I, as an employer, GAF who is the best student? I don’t have any jobs for studying and taking tests. I need to know who is the best project manager and best salesperson and best communicator. Mind you, I do think student quality has some overlap with the skills I’m looking for, but you’re the one talking about the “best students.”

I find the obsession over where a person spends 4 years of their life really odd. Especially in the DMV, people seem to take more about predictors of success than actual… success.

And before you accuse me of being a naive populist, I went to Northwestern.

The easiest way for you, as an employer, to determine who is the best manager / salesperson / communicator would be to administer some type of IQ or aptitude test to job applicants. But you're not allowed to do that thanks to Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971). Therefore, you, like all employers, are forced to use proxies to achieve the same effect. The leading proxy for ability to do the job is, of course, "what degree do you have and where did you get it from". That may not be optimal from an employer's perspective but here we are.

Not at all. To be blunt some of my best sales people surely had unimpressive IQs. Communication skills also are not well-predicted by IQ but are obvious from a good interview process. Getting the most tippy top bright students has never been my goal, because, again, I’ve never hired for a test taker.

If you were smart you would have noticed the "aptitude test" part and not gotten hung up on the IQ test part.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Where are these students supposed to go? There is a huge variety in where students decide to pursue higher education for lots is reasons. But top students with many academic gifts would overall gravitate to a challenging environment where they can make use of their talents.

And where they can afford to go.

Many, many of the best students apply and are admitted to “better” schools than where they ultimately enroll because they cannot afford to go to the more expensive school. Conversely, full pay students are not always the best students but they can pay.

Get you head out of your backside, OP.

Yep. If we had unlimited funds for school, DDs college list would look a lot different. She'd still be applying to LACs but sure, she'd take a shot at the the bigger brand names. But I know that's really just hedging against the idea that there are a lot of people out there who think marketing is an actual measure of education quality. But we have a budget, so if she doesn't want our in-state public Us, she needed to look a bit harder, focusing on what individual schools actually offer and she's really happy with her options.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Okay but why should I, as an employer, GAF who is the best student? I don’t have any jobs for studying and taking tests. I need to know who is the best project manager and best salesperson and best communicator. Mind you, I do think student quality has some overlap with the skills I’m looking for, but you’re the one talking about the “best students.”

I find the obsession over where a person spends 4 years of their life really odd. Especially in the DMV, people seem to take more about predictors of success than actual… success.

And before you accuse me of being a naive populist, I went to Northwestern.

The easiest way for you, as an employer, to determine who is the best manager / salesperson / communicator would be to administer some type of IQ or aptitude test to job applicants. But you're not allowed to do that thanks to Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971). Therefore, you, like all employers, are forced to use proxies to achieve the same effect. The leading proxy for ability to do the job is, of course, "what degree do you have and where did you get it from". That may not be optimal from an employer's perspective but here we are.

Not at all. To be blunt some of my best sales people surely had unimpressive IQs. Communication skills also are not well-predicted by IQ but are obvious from a good interview process. Getting the most tippy top bright students has never been my goal, because, again, I’ve never hired for a test taker.

If you were smart you would have noticed the "aptitude test" part and not gotten hung up on the IQ test part.

I don’t know how I can make it any clearer that I’m only moderately interested in test results. You know what I like? Actual results. Like the college student who did a sales internship and closed an average of 6 deals a week.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This whole thread is simply so out of touch with reality. Most people don’t care. I don’t care. I’ve worked with people from ivies and I’ve worked with people from unimpressive party schools. Their educational background has almost no correlation with how good of a coworker (or, in general, how good of an employee) they are.

Do people really feel the way OP does? Caring that much about pedigree just sounds exhausting.

But this thread is about college years, not post college.

But doesn’t one have to do with the other? Isn’t the point of college… getting a job? If I’m working with (and making similar salaries as) people from prestigious universities, then what’s the point of this conversation? Ultimately, so many of us end up in the same fields, with the same titles, doing similar work. I spend very little time worrying about where my colleagues went to college.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because they aren’t. You reach a level where they aren’t better students. Plenty of kids with unweighted 4.0s in the most rigorous classes and 1600s not being admitted. By objective measures, they are stronger academically than the 1500/3.9 kid who took the same classes. Or a 1400/3.7 hooked kid.

So instead it’s about soft factors. Which in many cases fine. I have no issue with building diverse classes.

But saying that that an athlete, legacy or URM in the 3.7/1400 pile is a better academic student than the 4.0/1600 kid is just wrong. They may bring other things to the class. Hey May end up very successful. But they are not academically superior by any objective measure.

+1

Also, money is a big consideration for many people. Lots of high-performing students go to “lesser” schools with big merit scholarships.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’ve worked with too many unimpressive yet simultaneously arrogant top 20 grads over the years.

+100 I hire from a wide range of schools but give the Ivy students a much greater probe for that attitude. I actually had to supervise an employee early in my career who thought she shouldn't have to do the usual entry-level assistant grunt work because she went to a "better school" than the other assistants. I'm sure she wasn't thrilled to have a regional state U graduate as her boss.

Absolutely there are fabulous students at top tier schools who will go on to do amazing things in the world. And I work with really impressive people who went to those schools. But there are also kids whose parents bought their way in and there are people who get a sense of superiority that makes them bad employees.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Okay but why should I, as an employer, GAF who is the best student? I don’t have any jobs for studying and taking tests. I need to know who is the best project manager and best salesperson and best communicator. Mind you, I do think student quality has some overlap with the skills I’m looking for, but you’re the one talking about the “best students.”

I find the obsession over where a person spends 4 years of their life really odd. Especially in the DMV, people seem to take more about predictors of success than actual… success.

And before you accuse me of being a naive populist, I went to Northwestern.

Some of my best performing employees have gone to colleges I’ve never heard of. The one Duke grad I had to hire since she was related to a senior staff member was terrible. She did not know how to work. She had terrible ideas and a fragile ego. After dropping the ball on a high-level project I was finally allowed to let her go. Can you believe that? I fired a Duke grad.

[Anonymous]

There is a vast difference between being a better student and being a better employee.

[Anonymous]

It is hard because just like times in swimming races which can vary by 1/100 of a second, the difference between students getting into the top 10 or top 60 are trivial at this point. Being a serious candidate is something to celebrate, but it doesn't mean you get in. Getting in is a lottery for top students - and sometimes only 2% win. I have sent 4 kids to college in 5 years and visited many top ones when COVID allowed and listened to more info sessions than I can remember. I have been told at schools like Tufts that they could fill their whole class with students with unweighted 4.0's and 1550 SATs and above if they wanted to, so it's not all about the grades. We were told at schools that as scores become optional, only kids with the best scores submit, making the school's averages seems off the charts. With the common app, kids apply to more schools than ever, look at Northeastern with over 90,000 applications last year. They didn't hire more reviewers, so each application gets maybe 2.5 minutes of review, and that is generous.

There are lots of smart kids, and some get into T10 and some don't, and no one knows why. So in my book T75 means something. And a kid in the top 15% of their class at any T75 school is probably pretty even. Kids get Cs at T10 schools (well not at Brown where P/F options are incredibly liberal- I have a kid there too) and that means something too. A C at Harvard is a C. Equal to a C at Michigan, or GA Tech.

Sports matter, legacies matter, DEI matters, gender matters, and balancing a class matters, and who else applies from your HS matters. I had a child get into Harvard with 8 APs (not submitting their scores cause they weren't all 5s), playing a sport, 1490 SAT and a child with 1590 SAT, 12 "5"s on APs, 2 college credits, classical violin, and work experience get rejected from Yale, Harvard and MIT.

You can believe only those who go to Harvard will rule the world, but only if Harvard is used as an adjective to describe a large group of elite schools, and not a noun to describe 1.

[Anonymous]

The age of a college undergraduate are the most developmentally significant time in a persons life. They figure who they are and how they fit in society. It’s a time to experiment. These are the years where mental illness can present. Sexuality is realized. At a local sought after Jesuit university many of these kids are legacies who came from catholic/Jesuit high schools and they have no problem getting everything they want. They not only have no idea who they are they have no idea how to solve a problem

Crashing as an undergraduate can be life changing. Not in a good way. Choosing a college for your child has nothing to do with the parents and everything to do with a fit for the student. Sending your children to your school can be the most harmful thing you can do.

What you think is a great school may be the worst thing for your child.

[Anonymous]

My oldest kid is at a top 10 and is shocked at the idiocy that she encounters. She was at an FCPS IB school and she is surrounded by northeastern private school and boarding school kids that frustrate the hell out of her. She wanted a top a top school because she is an intellectual at heart and wanted a highly academic environment, but it seems to her like half these kids were given grades without being given an education.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No one is disputing that top colleges have better students than ones like the college you describe. But I DO question whether there is any meaningful difference between students at a, say, top 15 vs the students at somewhere 50-75. If there is, it’s not nearly as much as people on here seem to think.

This. If the president of Harvard has said that about 85 percent of applicants ( pre COVID at least) would be able to do well there, but they only have space to take 7 percent of applicants, clearly those other highly able applicants who are not accepted are getting in at other schools and are highly able students. This applies to many highly rejective schools.