Degrees where college prestige matters

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:if your kid has to major in the humanities - classics, literature, history, sociology - try to go to an ivy. The degree with will be likely useless, by the name of the ivy on his/her resume will not.

I still do regret studying literature, but because I did it at Yale and Harvard (BA through PhD), I managed to make the transition from academia pretty painlessly. It shocked me how much the name impressed potential employers even though I felt woefully unqualified in terms of experience. People just assumed that I was smart enough to pick up new skills and fields of knowledge very quickly.

In the 30 years I've been working (half the time for a very well known tech company), I have learned that not every smart person can do any job. People, no matter how smart they are, are not plug and play where they can pickup new skills that quickly.

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, even ivy grads.

A lit. major from an ivy has a better chance of moving up and running a tech company than a code monkey. The latter are a dime a dozen from 3rd world countries. To move up, you need to be able to communicate. Can a code monkey write like a novelist? That's golden in management.

lol you definitely don't work in tech.

No one in upper management at tech companies need to write like a novelist, nor do they have degrees in literature. That's hysterical.

Most have either tech degrees or MBAs or some other business type background. There are those who have things like linguistics backgrounds for speech software, but high level tech people don't have literature degrees.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In the legal field, the prestige of your law school is what matters, not undergrad. And going to a fancy undergrad doesn’t give you an admissions boost for law school except maybe on the very edges. It’s all LSAT and GPA. In fact for someone targeting a T14 law school it might be a better strategy to go to a state school for undergrad if you can do better there (less competition).

Everyone gives this advice, but I have never seen anything that supports it...at all. Yale law school is 70% kids from just 20 undergraduate schools (all top schools), and then 30% come from 150+ other schools (i.e., 1 kid from each school).

The #1 feeder to any T14 school by far, is the undergraduate school. So, Harvard undergrad has the most kids at Harvard law, same for Northwestern, same for UVA.

I wish someone could show a link to an analysis or really anything to support the position that law school is only GPA and LSAT.

I’m the PP you’re responding to. I went to Penn Law, so I can’t comment on Yale. My class of ~250 at Penn comprised at least 50% of public and non-elite college alums. If you look at stats for admitted students (Law School Numbers is one source, although it’s self-reported), the common trend is that they are either at or above both medians for GPA/LSAT or have at least one of GPA/LSAT above the 75th percentile for those schools. The medians now are something like 3.9 GPA/171 LSAT and 75ths are obviously higher. Maybe attending an elite undergrad helps on the margin, like if they’re choosing between two applicants and it’s an “all else equal” situation, but otherwise those two numbers are the key factors. Often a high GPA and a high LSAT (required to get into any of those schools) means that the student is a strong academic performer and a strong standardized test taker, which sometimes/often correlates with the prestige of their undergrad institution. Obviously there are good reasons why it might not, and in my experience and also as borne out by empirical evidence if you look at T14 admits, students who are able to perform at that level (regardless of undergrad school) are not left out.

I would posit that the correlation between YLS admissions and T20 undergrad institutions is mostly just a correlation. The students admitted to YLS are, in all likelihood, lifelong high academic achievers. It makes sense that those students disproportionately attend T20 undergrad schools. Also, for what it’s worth, YLS is well known in law school admissions to be more “black box” and to value soft factors (i.e., not LSAT/GPA) more than their peer schools do. So maybe undergrad institution is a factor for them, I don’t know.

Once more, 50% of the class is coming from 20 schools and 50% is coming from 200+ schools. So, once more...even your example doesn't support your conclusion.

People can "posit" anything they want to pull out of their a**. Show me a true independent analysis that either proves you right (or proves me wrong).

I’m telling you this as someone who actually went through the law school admissions process and attended one of these schools. This is the advice I’d give my own kid. Multiple posters at this point have explained that there’s an obvious correlation between high academic achievers (counting both standardized test scores and GPA) and elite undergrad institutions, which partially explains why those institutions are overrepresented at elite law schools. I’m not going to spend any more time looking for evidence for you, but there’s plenty available if you care to do any research on this. You can start by looking at admitted student profiles on LSN, Reddit, and the TLS forum. The overriding factors in law school admissions are LSAT and GPA, prestige of undergrad institution is really not meaningful except insofar as it correlates to the obvious fact that these schools tend to produce students with extremely high GPAs (because those students were already exceptional academic achievers) AND 97th+ percentile LSAT scores of 170 and above.

If you have, and want to throw away, $400k on an elite college because you think it’s a good investment for elite law school admissions, it’s your money. You’re still incorrect about it.

+1

This is correct.
PP is having trouble separating causation from correlation.

I actually don’t. I am just looking for an independent study that supports anyone’s position on the topic.

I don’t care if I am proven right or wrong.

[Anonymous]

I went to an expensive top 15 undergrad school. I had many friends who went to top law schools to either meet a husband or extend their college experience and avoid adulthood. The expense was nothing to them. They just wanted to have a degree on their wall. They either practiced for a couple years or not at all. This is why top law schools have a high percentage of top private undergrads: money.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In the legal field, the prestige of your law school is what matters, not undergrad. And going to a fancy undergrad doesn’t give you an admissions boost for law school except maybe on the very edges. It’s all LSAT and GPA. In fact for someone targeting a T14 law school it might be a better strategy to go to a state school for undergrad if you can do better there (less competition).

Everyone gives this advice, but I have never seen anything that supports it...at all. Yale law school is 70% kids from just 20 undergraduate schools (all top schools), and then 30% come from 150+ other schools (i.e., 1 kid from each school).

The #1 feeder to any T14 school by far, is the undergraduate school. So, Harvard undergrad has the most kids at Harvard law, same for Northwestern, same for UVA.

I wish someone could show a link to an analysis or really anything to support the position that law school is only GPA and LSAT.

I’m the PP you’re responding to. I went to Penn Law, so I can’t comment on Yale. My class of ~250 at Penn comprised at least 50% of public and non-elite college alums. If you look at stats for admitted students (Law School Numbers is one source, although it’s self-reported), the common trend is that they are either at or above both medians for GPA/LSAT or have at least one of GPA/LSAT above the 75th percentile for those schools. The medians now are something like 3.9 GPA/171 LSAT and 75ths are obviously higher. Maybe attending an elite undergrad helps on the margin, like if they’re choosing between two applicants and it’s an “all else equal” situation, but otherwise those two numbers are the key factors. Often a high GPA and a high LSAT (required to get into any of those schools) means that the student is a strong academic performer and a strong standardized test taker, which sometimes/often correlates with the prestige of their undergrad institution. Obviously there are good reasons why it might not, and in my experience and also as borne out by empirical evidence if you look at T14 admits, students who are able to perform at that level (regardless of undergrad school) are not left out.

I would posit that the correlation between YLS admissions and T20 undergrad institutions is mostly just a correlation. The students admitted to YLS are, in all likelihood, lifelong high academic achievers. It makes sense that those students disproportionately attend T20 undergrad schools. Also, for what it’s worth, YLS is well known in law school admissions to be more “black box” and to value soft factors (i.e., not LSAT/GPA) more than their peer schools do. So maybe undergrad institution is a factor for them, I don’t know.

Once more, 50% of the class is coming from 20 schools and 50% is coming from 200+ schools. So, once more...even your example doesn't support your conclusion.

People can "posit" anything they want to pull out of their a**. Show me a true independent analysis that either proves you right (or proves me wrong).

I’m telling you this as someone who actually went through the law school admissions process and attended one of these schools. This is the advice I’d give my own kid. Multiple posters at this point have explained that there’s an obvious correlation between high academic achievers (counting both standardized test scores and GPA) and elite undergrad institutions, which partially explains why those institutions are overrepresented at elite law schools. I’m not going to spend any more time looking for evidence for you, but there’s plenty available if you care to do any research on this. You can start by looking at admitted student profiles on LSN, Reddit, and the TLS forum. The overriding factors in law school admissions are LSAT and GPA, prestige of undergrad institution is really not meaningful except insofar as it correlates to the obvious fact that these schools tend to produce students with extremely high GPAs (because those students were already exceptional academic achievers) AND 97th+ percentile LSAT scores of 170 and above.

If you have, and want to throw away, $400k on an elite college because you think it’s a good investment for elite law school admissions, it’s your money. You’re still incorrect about it.

+1

This is correct.
PP is having trouble separating causation from correlation.

I actually don’t. I am just looking for an independent study that supports anyone’s position on the topic.

I don’t care if I am proven right or wrong.

I would think you would want to do some version of the undergrad admissions study done years ago. I’m forgetting the details but something like those who applied to an Ivy but didn’t get in did as well later in life as those who were.

In this case, maybe it’s comparing that same group from undergrad, along with those who were accepted to Ivys (for shorthand) but didn’t go, along with those who did neither. Not all kids who do well at a mediocre school would do well on the LSAT etc but some subset will be strivers and/or didn’t have the money to attend a “better” undergrad school.

So I don’t think it’s the same chance to get into a T10 from a mid-tier college but an “Ivy-level” kid probably has a good chance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In the legal field, the prestige of your law school is what matters, not undergrad. And going to a fancy undergrad doesn’t give you an admissions boost for law school except maybe on the very edges. It’s all LSAT and GPA. In fact for someone targeting a T14 law school it might be a better strategy to go to a state school for undergrad if you can do better there (less competition).

Everyone gives this advice, but I have never seen anything that supports it...at all. Yale law school is 70% kids from just 20 undergraduate schools (all top schools), and then 30% come from 150+ other schools (i.e., 1 kid from each school).

The #1 feeder to any T14 school by far, is the undergraduate school. So, Harvard undergrad has the most kids at Harvard law, same for Northwestern, same for UVA.

I wish someone could show a link to an analysis or really anything to support the position that law school is only GPA and LSAT.

I’m the PP you’re responding to. I went to Penn Law, so I can’t comment on Yale. My class of ~250 at Penn comprised at least 50% of public and non-elite college alums. If you look at stats for admitted students (Law School Numbers is one source, although it’s self-reported), the common trend is that they are either at or above both medians for GPA/LSAT or have at least one of GPA/LSAT above the 75th percentile for those schools. The medians now are something like 3.9 GPA/171 LSAT and 75ths are obviously higher. Maybe attending an elite undergrad helps on the margin, like if they’re choosing between two applicants and it’s an “all else equal” situation, but otherwise those two numbers are the key factors. Often a high GPA and a high LSAT (required to get into any of those schools) means that the student is a strong academic performer and a strong standardized test taker, which sometimes/often correlates with the prestige of their undergrad institution. Obviously there are good reasons why it might not, and in my experience and also as borne out by empirical evidence if you look at T14 admits, students who are able to perform at that level (regardless of undergrad school) are not left out.

I would posit that the correlation between YLS admissions and T20 undergrad institutions is mostly just a correlation. The students admitted to YLS are, in all likelihood, lifelong high academic achievers. It makes sense that those students disproportionately attend T20 undergrad schools. Also, for what it’s worth, YLS is well known in law school admissions to be more “black box” and to value soft factors (i.e., not LSAT/GPA) more than their peer schools do. So maybe undergrad institution is a factor for them, I don’t know.

Once more, 50% of the class is coming from 20 schools and 50% is coming from 200+ schools. So, once more...even your example doesn't support your conclusion.

People can "posit" anything they want to pull out of their a**. Show me a true independent analysis that either proves you right (or proves me wrong).

I’m telling you this as someone who actually went through the law school admissions process and attended one of these schools. This is the advice I’d give my own kid. Multiple posters at this point have explained that there’s an obvious correlation between high academic achievers (counting both standardized test scores and GPA) and elite undergrad institutions, which partially explains why those institutions are overrepresented at elite law schools. I’m not going to spend any more time looking for evidence for you, but there’s plenty available if you care to do any research on this. You can start by looking at admitted student profiles on LSN, Reddit, and the TLS forum. The overriding factors in law school admissions are LSAT and GPA, prestige of undergrad institution is really not meaningful except insofar as it correlates to the obvious fact that these schools tend to produce students with extremely high GPAs (because those students were already exceptional academic achievers) AND 97th+ percentile LSAT scores of 170 and above.

If you have, and want to throw away, $400k on an elite college because you think it’s a good investment for elite law school admissions, it’s your money. You’re still incorrect about it.

+1

This is correct.
PP is having trouble separating causation from correlation.

I actually don’t. I am just looking for an independent study that supports anyone’s position on the topic.

I don’t care if I am proven right or wrong.

I would think you would want to do some version of the undergrad admissions study done years ago. I’m forgetting the details but something like those who applied to an Ivy but didn’t get in did as well later in life as those who were.

In this case, maybe it’s comparing that same group from undergrad, along with those who were accepted to Ivys (for shorthand) but didn’t go, along with those who did neither. Not all kids who do well at a mediocre school would do well on the LSAT etc but some subset will be strivers and/or didn’t have the money to attend a “better” undergrad school.

So I don’t think it’s the same chance to get into a T10 from a mid-tier college but an “Ivy-level” kid probably has a good chance.

I would settle for an analysis of all T14 law applicants to see if say a Harvard undergrad with a 170 LSAT and a 3.5 was still getting accepted over say a Clemson applicant with a 3.9 and a 175.

Does your undergraduate degree matter? Would the Harvard Econ major get a bump vs the Clemson kid studying sports management? Anything empirical.

The study you refer is on career outcomes. It is somewhat misleading because it says the kid accepted to Yale but enrolling at Penn State and graduating at the top of the class, does as well as the average Yale graduate professionally (the actual example was Yale and Penn State).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:if your kid has to major in the humanities - classics, literature, history, sociology - try to go to an ivy. The degree with will be likely useless, by the name of the ivy on his/her resume will not.

I still do regret studying literature, but because I did it at Yale and Harvard (BA through PhD), I managed to make the transition from academia pretty painlessly. It shocked me how much the name impressed potential employers even though I felt woefully unqualified in terms of experience. People just assumed that I was smart enough to pick up new skills and fields of knowledge very quickly.

In the 30 years I've been working (half the time for a very well known tech company), I have learned that not every smart person can do any job. People, no matter how smart they are, are not plug and play where they can pickup new skills that quickly.

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, even ivy grads.

A lit. major from an ivy has a better chance of moving up and running a tech company than a code monkey. The latter are a dime a dozen from 3rd world countries. To move up, you need to be able to communicate. Can a code monkey write like a novelist? That's golden in management.

lol you definitely don't work in tech.

No one in upper management at tech companies need to write like a novelist, nor do they have degrees in literature. That's hysterical.

Most have either tech degrees or MBAs or some other business type background. There are those who have things like linguistics backgrounds for speech software, but high level tech people don't have literature degrees.

You missed the point. They need to communicate. If they can write, they will go far.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I will play:

Nursing-absolutely not, same salaries for Ivy or CC trained nurses, same options for NP/PA school(many which are online).

Lawyers--seems this one is the most important to land high paying jobs, though still think being connected(through family or friends) and good social skills come a long way

Medicine-absolutely not, MD/DO the same, i guess if you are a cash pay derm/psych r plastic surgeon and Ivy will get you more customers but charisma. how you do your work and patient referrals do more for you.

Social work--not really-cash pay patients seeing online degree therapists also a thing here, more about your marketing skills than therapy skills.

Disagree about medicine. It does matter- depending on what specialty and where you want to work. Where you go to school can absolutely affect what type of residency you match with (and if you get your first choice) and what institution hires you afterward. Most doctors are not private practice, therefore they are subjected to the hiring process by a panel like other professionals, where they do consider your credentials.

You get into a desired residency based on usmle 2 scores-they got rid of scoring for part 1 due to equity LOL. What really gets you into a good residency is research and being published in selective med journals (this is hard to do when you are volunteering cleaning poop in the hospital so you can get into med school)-which can be done also by foreign trained docs(who didnt have to clean poop in their foreign countries to become docs)-have foreign med school derm friend who went research way to derm residency-making 1mil doing botox and fillers is so cal now....life is good

Large research based hospitals are more likely to hire doctors from more prestigious academic institutions, same with research opportunities while in med school. That doesn’t mean super high salary necessarily.

So…it just depends what you what to do and where you want to practice. You can be a no name state med school graduate and make 800k taking out gall bladders all day as a general surgeon in North Dakota. But maybe you want to make 500k at Hopkins or Duke

If you are not a procedure doc you will make low 200s at the Ivys doing clinical/academic research, you will feel you are using your intellect and could potentially make some life saving discoveries, however
the world of this type of elite medicine is getting smaller and smaller unfortunately.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I will play:

Nursing-absolutely not, same salaries for Ivy or CC trained nurses, same options for NP/PA school(many which are online).

Lawyers--seems this one is the most important to land high paying jobs, though still think being connected(through family or friends) and good social skills come a long way

Medicine-absolutely not, MD/DO the same, i guess if you are a cash pay derm/psych r plastic surgeon and Ivy will get you more customers but charisma. how you do your work and patient referrals do more for you.

Social work--not really-cash pay patients seeing online degree therapists also a thing here, more about your marketing skills than therapy skills.

Disagree about medicine. It does matter- depending on what specialty and where you want to work. Where you go to school can absolutely affect what type of residency you match with (and if you get your first choice) and what institution hires you afterward. Most doctors are not private practice, therefore they are subjected to the hiring process by a panel like other professionals, where they do consider your credentials.

You get into a desired residency based on usmle 2 scores-they got rid of scoring for part 1 due to equity LOL. What really gets you into a good residency is research and being published in selective med journals (this is hard to do when you are volunteering cleaning poop in the hospital so you can get into med school)-which can be done also by foreign trained docs(who didnt have to clean poop in their foreign countries to become docs)-have foreign med school derm friend who went research way to derm residency-making 1mil doing botox and fillers is so cal now....life is good

Large research based hospitals are more likely to hire doctors from more prestigious academic institutions, same with research opportunities while in med school. That doesn’t mean super high salary necessarily.

So…it just depends what you what to do and where you want to practice. You can be a no name state med school graduate and make 800k taking out gall bladders all day as a general surgeon in North Dakota. But maybe you want to make 500k at Hopkins or Duke

If you are not a procedure doc you will make low 200s at the Ivys doing clinical/academic research, you will feel you are using your intellect and could potentially make some life saving discoveries, however
the world of this type of elite medicine is getting smaller and smaller unfortunately.

Doctors dont want to do it anymore for these low salaries (all this volunteering is posturing-its making the people go into it more and more jaded) and the new grads are totally different than the Gen X ones...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In the legal field, the prestige of your law school is what matters, not undergrad. And going to a fancy undergrad doesn’t give you an admissions boost for law school except maybe on the very edges. It’s all LSAT and GPA. In fact for someone targeting a T14 law school it might be a better strategy to go to a state school for undergrad if you can do better there (less competition).

Everyone gives this advice, but I have never seen anything that supports it...at all. Yale law school is 70% kids from just 20 undergraduate schools (all top schools), and then 30% come from 150+ other schools (i.e., 1 kid from each school).

The #1 feeder to any T14 school by far, is the undergraduate school. So, Harvard undergrad has the most kids at Harvard law, same for Northwestern, same for UVA.

I wish someone could show a link to an analysis or really anything to support the position that law school is only GPA and LSAT.

I’m the PP you’re responding to. I went to Penn Law, so I can’t comment on Yale. My class of ~250 at Penn comprised at least 50% of public and non-elite college alums. If you look at stats for admitted students (Law School Numbers is one source, although it’s self-reported), the common trend is that they are either at or above both medians for GPA/LSAT or have at least one of GPA/LSAT above the 75th percentile for those schools. The medians now are something like 3.9 GPA/171 LSAT and 75ths are obviously higher. Maybe attending an elite undergrad helps on the margin, like if they’re choosing between two applicants and it’s an “all else equal” situation, but otherwise those two numbers are the key factors. Often a high GPA and a high LSAT (required to get into any of those schools) means that the student is a strong academic performer and a strong standardized test taker, which sometimes/often correlates with the prestige of their undergrad institution. Obviously there are good reasons why it might not, and in my experience and also as borne out by empirical evidence if you look at T14 admits, students who are able to perform at that level (regardless of undergrad school) are not left out.

I would posit that the correlation between YLS admissions and T20 undergrad institutions is mostly just a correlation. The students admitted to YLS are, in all likelihood, lifelong high academic achievers. It makes sense that those students disproportionately attend T20 undergrad schools. Also, for what it’s worth, YLS is well known in law school admissions to be more “black box” and to value soft factors (i.e., not LSAT/GPA) more than their peer schools do. So maybe undergrad institution is a factor for them, I don’t know.

Once more, 50% of the class is coming from 20 schools and 50% is coming from 200+ schools. So, once more...even your example doesn't support your conclusion.

People can "posit" anything they want to pull out of their a**. Show me a true independent analysis that either proves you right (or proves me wrong).

I’m telling you this as someone who actually went through the law school admissions process and attended one of these schools. This is the advice I’d give my own kid. Multiple posters at this point have explained that there’s an obvious correlation between high academic achievers (counting both standardized test scores and GPA) and elite undergrad institutions, which partially explains why those institutions are overrepresented at elite law schools. I’m not going to spend any more time looking for evidence for you, but there’s plenty available if you care to do any research on this. You can start by looking at admitted student profiles on LSN, Reddit, and the TLS forum. The overriding factors in law school admissions are LSAT and GPA, prestige of undergrad institution is really not meaningful except insofar as it correlates to the obvious fact that these schools tend to produce students with extremely high GPAs (because those students were already exceptional academic achievers) AND 97th+ percentile LSAT scores of 170 and above.

If you have, and want to throw away, $400k on an elite college because you think it’s a good investment for elite law school admissions, it’s your money. You’re still incorrect about it.

+1

This is correct.
PP is having trouble separating causation from correlation.

I actually don’t. I am just looking for an independent study that supports anyone’s position on the topic.

I don’t care if I am proven right or wrong.

I would think you would want to do some version of the undergrad admissions study done years ago. I’m forgetting the details but something like those who applied to an Ivy but didn’t get in did as well later in life as those who were.

In this case, maybe it’s comparing that same group from undergrad, along with those who were accepted to Ivys (for shorthand) but didn’t go, along with those who did neither. Not all kids who do well at a mediocre school would do well on the LSAT etc but some subset will be strivers and/or didn’t have the money to attend a “better” undergrad school.

So I don’t think it’s the same chance to get into a T10 from a mid-tier college but an “Ivy-level” kid probably has a good chance.

I would settle for an analysis of all T14 law applicants to see if say a Harvard undergrad with a 170 LSAT and a 3.5 was still getting accepted over say a Clemson applicant with a 3.9 and a 175.

Does your undergraduate degree matter? Would the Harvard Econ major get a bump vs the Clemson kid studying sports management? Anything empirical.

The study you refer is on career outcomes. It is somewhat misleading because it says the kid accepted to Yale but enrolling at Penn State and graduating at the top of the class, does as well as the average Yale graduate professionally (the actual example was Yale and Penn State).

I recently worked for years on a graduate degree in education. I had to read hundreds of journal articles.

I recall one recent study found that lawyers who had gone to prestigious undergrad colleges made more money & had better careers than lawyers who had done equally well at the same or comparable law schools but who had attended less-prestigious undergraduate colleges.

I threw the article away because I didn’t use it, but rest assured there IS such an article out there if you want to take a little time to find it.

[Anonymous]

I’m the pp. I’m bored & quickly found the article I just mentioned. It’s called “Catching up is hard to do: undergraduate prestige, elite graduate programs, and the earnings premium” by Joni Hersch. Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, fall 2019.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I will play:

Nursing-absolutely not, same salaries for Ivy or CC trained nurses, same options for NP/PA school(many which are online).

Lawyers--seems this one is the most important to land high paying jobs, though still think being connected(through family or friends) and good social skills come a long way

Medicine-absolutely not, MD/DO the same, i guess if you are a cash pay derm/psych r plastic surgeon and Ivy will get you more customers but charisma. how you do your work and patient referrals do more for you.

Social work--not really-cash pay patients seeing online degree therapists also a thing here, more about your marketing skills than therapy skills.

I’m an equity partner at AMLAW 50. As far as landing a job, undergrad institution matters practically not at all. Law school does to a certain amount. It’s certainly easier to get into big law from the middle third of Harvard law than it is from Maryland School of Law. But plenty of Maryland grads will end up in AMLAW 100 or 200 firms. Almost all these firms have offices all over the country and hire from the local law schools.

That is a massive understatement. Look at the bios on any AMLAW 100 firm and you will see lots of T14 and a few state flagships. Consider how many graduates are being produced by schools outside of either flagships or the T14 relative to how often they appear and you'll see how long the odds are

Any advanced degree program (JD, MD, PhD, etc.) has 22 years (or more) of personal development (in all areas) to go on in making admission decisions. Programs that are perceived to be stronger than others will get first crack at most of the strongest applicants. This is the primary reason graduates of top-ranked programs get desirable positions in higher proportion than those from lower-ranked programs, not something that happens at those universities. It's because the top-ranked programs have had the first pick of those most likely to succeed and have used that criterion when selecting who to admit. The individual is what matters most, not the school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teaching - go the cheapest route possible, bc after 15 years, you're making less than most early grads.

and get the degree in a state you want to work in after college. That way you will do your student teaching there and be certified for that state.

Good advice, but many states have reciprocal agreements that make it not too difficult to get certified in other states.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I will play:

Nursing-absolutely not, same salaries for Ivy or CC trained nurses, same options for NP/PA school(many which are online).

Lawyers--seems this one is the most important to land high paying jobs, though still think being connected(through family or friends) and good social skills come a long way

Medicine-absolutely not, MD/DO the same, i guess if you are a cash pay derm/psych r plastic surgeon and Ivy will get you more customers but charisma. how you do your work and patient referrals do more for you.

Social work--not really-cash pay patients seeing online degree therapists also a thing here, more about your marketing skills than therapy skills.

Nursing -- correctish. You can get higher paying jobs from top programs in specialties that are not open to most.

Lawyers -- connected not a help at all in biglaw. They have taken that all out of the process. If a partner came and said take a look at kid X he is a family friend, most firms would not look at or would and dismiss. Law school and law school grades most important. Undergrad secondary but still counts when interviewing.

Medicine -- agree

Social work ---- agree but when it comes to running non-profits, donors are still impressed with a Harvard or Stanford.

+1. True about law firms - if you have ever worked for the biggest (and also the top, BTW) law firms in the metropolitan areas, you know that they only hire from certain schools - but you know know that before you even step foot in law school.

This statement is quickly refuted by looking at the bios of the attorneys at any law firm. Nobody hires 'only from certain schools'.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just read a bio of the CEO of T Rowe Price. He went to Towson then got an MBA from Wharton. Despite Wharton being the top business school on Wall Street, he still faced discrimination in finance hiring because of going to Towson.

This just made me laugh. Obviously it didn't hurt him that much.....

+1 Nonsensical example.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I will play:

Nursing-absolutely not, same salaries for Ivy or CC trained nurses, same options for NP/PA school(many which are online).

Lawyers--seems this one is the most important to land high paying jobs, though still think being connected(through family or friends) and good social skills come a long way

Medicine-absolutely not, MD/DO the same, i guess if you are a cash pay derm/psych r plastic surgeon and Ivy will get you more customers but charisma. how you do your work and patient referrals do more for you.

Social work--not really-cash pay patients seeing online degree therapists also a thing here, more about your marketing skills than therapy skills.

Disagree about medicine. It does matter- depending on what specialty and where you want to work. Where you go to school can absolutely affect what type of residency you match with (and if you get your first choice) and what institution hires you afterward. Most doctors are not private practice, therefore they are subjected to the hiring process by a panel like other professionals, where they do consider your credentials.

I like the lists on the website below, which show where people in prestigious positions studied. The linked list shows your assertion to be incorrect.

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/medicine/