My child attends an elite college. It is overrated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kids also went to “elite” colleges. I think your reference to “elbowy overachievers” is gross. My DD definitely is a grind it out kind of student but also made plenty of close friends, was involved in a couple of clubs and in a sorority. Not elbowy at all. Her starting salary out of college was in the range you referenced. Even if it was half that, I would think she is doing well - but I never thought that her college was supposed to be a path to a high paying career. She had a great education and that was the goal. I think your take that it’s the well-connected or elbowy overachievers who benefit from the education is ridiculous, and you sound like you need to tear other kids down to feel better better about where your own kid has landed.

DP. You don't sound any different than OP. All of you are so...mean and defensive. If your child is not "elbowy", why would you feel compelled to write such a defensive post?

Elbowy, indeed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Major is more important, the best combo would be ivy League and computer science

“I am desperate to hire a computer scientist from Brown” said no one ever.

Yes definitely go to Dartmouth over MIT, very smart advice.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Major is more important, the best combo would be ivy League and computer science

“I am desperate to hire a computer scientist from Brown” said no one ever.

Yes definitely go to Dartmouth over MIT, very smart advice.

Looks like you are one of the few who said no
https://www.gradreports.com/best-colleges/computer-science

[Anonymous]

I'm making margaritas with all the salt in this thread.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Major is more important, the best combo would be ivy League and computer science

“I am desperate to hire a computer scientist from Brown” said no one ever.

Yes definitely go to Dartmouth over MIT, very smart advice.

Looks like you are one of the few who said no
https://www.gradreports.com/best-colleges/computer-science

Yes I definitely believe this chart that ranks Brown CS over both Stanford and MIT.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Major is more important, the best combo would be ivy League and computer science

“I am desperate to hire a computer scientist from Brown” said no one ever.

Yes definitely go to Dartmouth over MIT, very smart advice.

Looks like you are one of the few who said no
https://www.gradreports.com/best-colleges/computer-science

Yes I definitely believe this chart that ranks Brown CS over both Stanford and MIT.

It is based on salary. Brown sends a lot of kids to consulting, banking, hedge funds, etc...more than you might think. The CS kids are highly recruited for those jobs.

I think Brown has a much lower %age of CS kids that actually work in tech vs. Stanford and MIT.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maybe it's too early to tell or maybe she just didn't capitalize on all the opportunities (I suspect very few do) but it most certainly has not changed her life. The thing I do notice is overall a higher percentage of deeply committed pre-med students than my son's peers at the state flagship. Other than that there's this laughable idea that an elite college is a golden ticket to a $150,000 job offer and a rich spouse and that's just not accurate. The plum six-figure job offers are scarce and go to the connected and elbowy overachievers with perfect grades. And generally the rich socialize with the rich. If you want your child in that orbit they need to be in that orbit by 9th grade at some ritzy prep or boarding school.

I have a niece at Cornell who is close with my daughter and she has had a similar experience. At Cornell the rich are in the rich kid sororities and fraternities.

A few years back we were caught up in the admissions frenzy but in retrospect it seems so nutty. I'm [now] far more impressed with a parent who tells me their kid is at a less selective school but just got into medical school than some Ivy League parent who tells me their ubiquitous kid is going into "consulting" for $60,000 a year or some second rate grad program.

This is a fact. If you come from money it does not matter if you go to Virginia Tech or Columbia. Rich kids get hooked up. It just happens that there are more rich kids per capita at Columbia than VT. My kids go/went to such a school and starting in high school they got excellent internships along side college kids. It was all becuase mom and dad got their foot in the door.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kids also went to “elite” colleges. I think your reference to “elbowy overachievers” is gross. My DD definitely is a grind it out kind of student but also made plenty of close friends, was involved in a couple of clubs and in a sorority. Not elbowy at all. Her starting salary out of college was in the range you referenced. Even if it was half that, I would think she is doing well - but I never thought that her college was supposed to be a path to a high paying career. She had a great education and that was the goal. I think your take that it’s the well-connected or elbowy overachievers who benefit from the education is ridiculous, and you sound like you need to tear other kids down to feel better better about where your own kid has landed.

DP. You don't sound any different than OP. All of you are so...mean and defensive. If your child is not "elbowy", why would you feel compelled to write such a defensive post?

Elbowy, indeed.

DP. This didn’t strike me at all as defensive or “elbowy”. I read it as a reminder that the PP’s sweeping generalization about kids at “elite” colleges does not apply to all. (Sweeping generalizations rarely do … and sometimes they even miss the mark completely.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Major is more important, the best combo would be ivy League and computer science

WRONG. I work in tech and that would be a colossal waste of money. where you went to "study" CS is probably one of the least important criteria in an interview process where you have on-site in person coding tests. If you can get past that we do not give AF where you went to college or even if you went to college. Nobody is like "oh wow, lets check out this SWE from Brown" No.

Ivy league is GREAT if you want to go into law, politics, or high finance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I went to Duke and this is a pretty accurate (and bitter) summary. I wish I had gone to a cheaper school close to home, and maybe done pre med or something. But I wasn’t really organized enough to take advantage of the opportunities available. Oh well. I did end up going to law school on the cheap with scholarships so I learned my lesson!

Becoming a doctor is very different than becoming an attorney. Usually someone is drawn specifically to one of them. Doctors do important work and have to be highly intelligent and have an excellent work ethic. There are more attorneys than there are jobs. The median income for attorneys is about $120,000.

If you were meant to be a doctor you probably would have chosen the cheaper one. Students knowing exactly what they want to do won’t necessarily need the elite school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maybe it's too early to tell or maybe she just didn't capitalize on all the opportunities (I suspect very few do) but it most certainly has not changed her life. The thing I do notice is overall a higher percentage of deeply committed pre-med students than my son's peers at the state flagship. Other than that there's this laughable idea that an elite college is a golden ticket to a $150,000 job offer and a rich spouse and that's just not accurate. The plum six-figure job offers are scarce and go to the connected and elbowy overachievers with perfect grades. And generally the rich socialize with the rich. If you want your child in that orbit they need to be in that orbit by 9th grade at some ritzy prep or boarding school.

I have a niece at Cornell who is close with my daughter and she has had a similar experience. At Cornell the rich are in the rich kid sororities and fraternities.

A few years back we were caught up in the admissions frenzy but in retrospect it seems so nutty. I'm [now] far more impressed with a parent who tells me their kid is at a less selective school but just got into medical school than some Ivy League parent who tells me their ubiquitous kid is going into "consulting" for $60,000 a year or some second rate grad program.

It is overrated when psycho tiger mom strivers living their teens scam them into a college they don't belong in. I know parents whose control their teen's email account, social media, LinkedIn, wrote all of their Common App essays, force them to do summer programs, fake founder of a nonprofit, the whole nine. If your kid doesn't have a hyper competitive bone in their body, why curate this fake hypercompetitive bio and con them into a hypercompetitive college? They feel like dummies on campus because they are the dullest most noncompetitive students there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Major is more important, the best combo would be ivy League and computer science

“I am desperate to hire a computer scientist from Brown” said no one ever.

Yes definitely go to Dartmouth over MIT, very smart advice.

You're uninformed.

Brown's computer science graphics program is very famous. A bunch of grads were founders of a little company called "Pixar" you may have heard of. "Andy" in toy story was named after legendary Brown CS professor Andy VanDam by his students (you can see the textbook he wrote on a shelf in the film) and Brown CS grads do great in the field, especially in the highly competitive fields of graphics and animation.

So you're completely wrong. Maybe stop posting?

https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-10-05/vandam

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andries_van_Dam

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe it's too early to tell or maybe she just didn't capitalize on all the opportunities (I suspect very few do) but it most certainly has not changed her life. The thing I do notice is overall a higher percentage of deeply committed pre-med students than my son's peers at the state flagship. Other than that there's this laughable idea that an elite college is a golden ticket to a $150,000 job offer and a rich spouse and that's just not accurate. The plum six-figure job offers are scarce and go to the connected and elbowy overachievers with perfect grades. And generally the rich socialize with the rich. If you want your child in that orbit they need to be in that orbit by 9th grade at some ritzy prep or boarding school.

I have a niece at Cornell who is close with my daughter and she has had a similar experience. At Cornell the rich are in the rich kid sororities and fraternities.

A few years back we were caught up in the admissions frenzy but in retrospect it seems so nutty. I'm [now] far more impressed with a parent who tells me their kid is at a less selective school but just got into medical school than some Ivy League parent who tells me their ubiquitous kid is going into "consulting" for $60,000 a year or some second rate grad program.

It is overrated when psycho tiger mom strivers living their teens scam them into a college they don't belong in. I know parents whose control their teen's email account, social media, LinkedIn, wrote all of their Common App essays, force them to do summer programs, fake founder of a nonprofit, the whole nine. If your kid doesn't have a hyper competitive bone in their body, why curate this fake hypercompetitive bio and con them into a hypercompetitive college? They feel like dummies on campus because they are the dullest most noncompetitive students there.

My kid got into these schools on his own. No private counselor. No fake narratives. No fake non-profits. No tiger mom or tiger dad.

I am impressed with him for the outcomes he is having this cycle which appear to be merit-based (no hooks at all) and on the personality he conveyed and hard work he alone put into essays/supplementals.

In fact, my spouse and I are shocked he's been getting into these 5-6% acceptance rate schools when the tiger parents were going on about how impossible admissions were.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Crazy that DCUM is bashing OP because elite colleges are all that DCUM respects. If DCUMers know that top schools won’t transform lives, then why the hype and frustration about not getting into one? For what it’s worth, I went to a Top 15 school, and my kid is going to UVA. Never allowed him to consider the overpriced, overhyped schools.

Agree with PP - the way elite colleges are obsessed over here is insanity and bashing the OP doesn't say about the PP's what they think it does...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe it's too early to tell or maybe she just didn't capitalize on all the opportunities (I suspect very few do) but it most certainly has not changed her life. The thing I do notice is overall a higher percentage of deeply committed pre-med students than my son's peers at the state flagship. Other than that there's this laughable idea that an elite college is a golden ticket to a $150,000 job offer and a rich spouse and that's just not accurate. The plum six-figure job offers are scarce and go to the connected and elbowy overachievers with perfect grades. And generally the rich socialize with the rich. If you want your child in that orbit they need to be in that orbit by 9th grade at some ritzy prep or boarding school.

I have a niece at Cornell who is close with my daughter and she has had a similar experience. At Cornell the rich are in the rich kid sororities and fraternities.

A few years back we were caught up in the admissions frenzy but in retrospect it seems so nutty. I'm [now] far more impressed with a parent who tells me their kid is at a less selective school but just got into medical school than some Ivy League parent who tells me their ubiquitous kid is going into "consulting" for $60,000 a year or some second rate grad program.

It is overrated when psycho tiger mom strivers living their teens scam them into a college they don't belong in. I know parents whose control their teen's email account, social media, LinkedIn, wrote all of their Common App essays, force them to do summer programs, fake founder of a nonprofit, the whole nine. If your kid doesn't have a hyper competitive bone in their body, why curate this fake hypercompetitive bio and con them into a hypercompetitive college? They feel like dummies on campus because they are the dullest most noncompetitive students there.

My kid got into these schools on his own. No private counselor. No fake narratives. No fake non-profits. No tiger mom or tiger dad.

I am impressed with him for the outcomes he is having this cycle which appear to be merit-based (no hooks at all) and on the personality he conveyed and hard work he alone put into essays/supplementals.

In fact, my spouse and I are shocked he's been getting into these 5-6% acceptance rate schools when the tiger parents were going on about how impossible admissions were.

Agree! Mine did it with no private counselor nor fake narratives, just pure smarts, high scores, true intellectual curiosity and love of all hard subjects. Both at top-10 USnews "elite" schools (one ivy, one non) and loving it, love the challenging classes, getting to know incredibly talented profs, and being surrounded by other highly intelligent peers. They fit in better than they did in their competitive private school , because now the vast majority is the same level of intellect and they all push each other. I went to an elite. It was life-changing as a high-financial-need white kid from an average urban public. The kids who bottom out and hate elites were likely over-prepared by parents doing too much for them in high school, or got in on a major hook and not actually ready for the intense academics. My elite was a pipeline to top 50 med and T14 law schools, and high-paying industries, as are my kids' elites.