Reply to Any Ivy graduates here? Ivy League graduate son in a funk, humuliated, & remains jobless

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Some of the comments are amusing. People really, greatly, hugely, exaggerate the ability of a mere Ivy degree to get you a great job. An Ivy degree can make recruiters and hiring managers look more closely at your resume but that's it. There are plenty of Ivy grads who get nowhere. There's no quotas set aside for Ivy grads at premier investment firms and IB isn't what it was 20 years ago either. Yes, the bright kids go on to great things but they proactively made it happen rather than waiting for it to happen. [b]The "networking" is nothing like what some people on here might want to believe. It barely exists[/b]. If anything, it's better at UVA than Columbia. [/quote]

Do you have any data to back this up?[/quote]

This is directly my experience, as a lower middle class Ivy grad. In fact I think there is very little class mingling at an Ivy except for dating and maybe sports (I am not an athlete so don’t know —- it may be exceptional skill not just team membership that gives you an in?). From what I’ve seen most people are using their parents snd elite high school network (deeper relationships with shared history) and don’t need to interact with college network. [/quote]

The cliques at elite colleges are pretty stratified. Maybe everyone sort of parties with each other, but the rich kids, or more specifically the rich kids' parents, are not sticking their neck out to get the middle class token "friend" some plum job. There was a book a while back about Yale graduates. The lower class guy in a group of Yale friends was invited to be a groomsman at weddings and yet after college he was back to his dumpy hometown. The lower class guy ended up getting murdered in his hometown because he was selling drugs or something low class like this, while his ritzy friends were in Manhattan with plum jobs.[/quote]

I know what store you're talking about. This involved a african american man who went back to his home in NJ to be a science teacher while also selling drugs.

There is a lot more to the story than you told. smh.[/quote]

I was a classmate and we had mutual friends, and the story is way too complicated for it to contain lessons relevant to this thread.

However, I was once your son. I actually graduated 2 months late due to a series of complications that are embarrassing and too tedious to put here but put me in summer school. I was the only one of my friends without a job offer at graduation, and I had zero financial backup from my parents. This was the days before full tuition grants for families under certain income thresholds, so instead of internships and resume-building jobs, I had to work at restaurants and other places to earn enough to cover what my parents couldn’t. Career services at the time restricted most on-campus recruiting by GPA so I couldn’t apply to 90% of the positions advertised.

I somehow slipped into a very low-paying but salaried job that was posted on the career services website and that no one else had applied to. It was not what I ever imagined myself doing but it was enough to live in a shared apartment in a big city and not go home to my parents’ house. After two years there, I saw a post on an alumni board looking for an assistant to replace an older alumni who was going to grad school. I got the job, which led to another job with tuition reimbursement. I used that to take classes at night to build up my GPA and applied to grad school. Yes, I had to use an optional essay to explain my undergrad stumbles, but it worked.

Many years later I am married to a fellow alumni of my alma mater who was an athlete from a prep school. His path was very different and far easier than mine. He didn’t even get into school the same way I did. His parents weren’t rich but he had money to fly home at breaks and eat at restaurants on the weekends. We were at the same school but we had very different experiences and he was able to get a lot more out of his education because of privileges he arrived with. In spite of his own bad grades, he only had to mention his career interest to an older teammate and he got an interview at a firm that hired him.

Don’t let your son compare his path to those other students’. It’s just not the same. Do tell your son that there is hope and that I was him 20 years ago. [/quote]

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