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[quote=Anonymous]The answer to this is 25% "fact" and 75% fuzzy, but here it goes:

-  In certain industries like venture capital, it is amazing in this day and age that the Ivy leagues and Stanford so thoroughly dominate the number of people in the industry...and to be even more niche, Stanford and Harvard dominate within that subset...so if your kid somehow knows they want to work in VC, then hard to argue that it does not matter;
-  Having graduated from an Ivy and worked in Ibanking in NYC (and this 25 years ago), yes there are lots of Ivy league kids and they all recruit there, but there were also lots of kids that went to schools with top undergraduate business programs like UVA, Wash U, etc., as well as kids that went to a range of other schools but tended to have Math/CS/Engineering backgrounds.  My understanding is that recruiting in this industry has become even more egalitarian because Wall Street / Finance has lost its allure these days;
-  I now work with a ton of technology companies and anecdotally it is hard to discern what advantage top schools may confer with respect to technical positions...there are many large state schools with top STEM programs that send kids to high paying jobs in Tech (little known fact...the #1 supplier of STEM grads to Google/Microsoft/Apple, etc. is actually University of Waterloo in Canada);
- There are lots of people working in Tech in top jobs that dropped out of college or skipped college entirely...I do know that if you can prove you know what you are doing, then a college degree is not required.  These are people with skills that know what they are doing...the Hackers so to speak;
-  The really big intangible is the network of kids you meet at college and become friendly and then help you in life...you are more likely to become friends with the child of a billionaire or Hundred Millionaire at an Ivy League or Stanford or MIT then most other schools or if you are starting a company, I guarantee it is easier to get that initial VC meeting if you graduated from the "chosen" schools;
-  You can also gain many of these advantages through an MBA at these top schools, so just keep that in mind in the grand scheme of things;
-  I don't really know, but I suspect that if you have a kid that you know wants to go to Medical School, then not sure what an Ivy really does for you...it may make life a ton worse as I remember that you needed like a 97% to get an A in Organic Chemistry because the curve was so insane with all the Pre-Med, Engineering, STEM kids taking the class.  Of course, your kid may decide 1/2 way through that they don't want to go to Med School and then see above;
-  At the end of the day, what you study at school and then what you decide as a career will determine much of the trajectory...I know many people that graduated that chose paths in acadamia, non-profits, government or were just lost.  There are no "special" high paying jobs in these fields reserved for Ivy league grads.

My $.02 for anyone that cares.[/quote]

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