Reply to What’s the point of going to a top school if you end up in the same place as someone who didn’t

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am not a troll. I’m the parent of a HS sophomore who is killing themselves excelling in school and participating in extracurriculars to be competitive for T20.

At the same time, I see parents on here posting how their kid went to Cornell and ended up in the same place as someone who went to Pitt or another similarly ranked school.

At the same time, in my job I work alongside people who have gone to ivies and schools I’ve never heard of. I went to Michigan, btw.

My sister did her undergraduate at Oxford, stayed in the UK and is now partner at a well respected consulting firm alongside other partners that went to no name schools from India.

So seeing the stress my kid goes through, I am honestly asking what is the point of a Yale or Princeton if they take you to the same place that a school like Rutgers and Radford can take you?! [/quote]

I went to two top-tier schools (top 5s for undergrad and law), and the experience was absolutely worth it for me. And yes, I killed myself for years to get on the elite university track and stay on it. But the resources at my schools were unparalleled. There's almost no other place where you can take classes from and interact with Nobel Laureates and Pulitzer Prize-winning historians on a regular basis. I had weekly violin lessons from a concert violinist, giving me access to training that I otherwise would have needed admission to a top conservatory to get. With basically zero competition, I was able to get into the lab of a scientist regarded as one of the leading experts in his branch of science.

Regarding job outcomes: there aren't special jobs that are set aside for graduates of elite universities, but I've seen my cohort have a really outsized impact. I think whether someone ends up in a high-impact job comes down to risk tolerance. If you go for a consulting or biglaw job, that's pretty low risk (there's a defined path to get the job, and a defined ladder to climb at the firm). You're pretty much guaranteed to make a large salary. But you're probably not going to have as big an impact. You might occasionally read in the news about a deal you worked on or a big case. But it'll be infrequent. The kinds of jobs in which you have a bigger impact require you to take a bigger risk and get off the well-defined career ladders. Things like medical research, public policy, starting your own business, etc. For those job, the network is really helpful--but you have to start from a place of loving what you're working on, and not doing it for the money. [/quote]

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