Reply to My child attends an elite college. It is overrated.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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 [i]changed her life[/i]. 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.[/quote]

Thanks for your post. We nervous DCUM parents need to hear this. [/quote]

Don't be so nervous. I have a kid about to graduate college - (high school class of 2020) - he has friends at a wide range of colleges. The ones  already with the secure over 100K jobs are coming from UMD, Indiana, Wisconsin and Lehigh.  Graduate school of some sort for most of the LACs and some Ivys, unknown for many of the kids, but it's really not apparent that the Ivy kids or "best" schools are really giving off better results, especially in year 1.  Many kids also took class of 2020 covid gap years and he has many friends that are either juniors in college or else taking closer to 5 years to graduate (most of the 4+ year graduates are from big OOS schools-- too hard to graduate in 4 years at those places).

In any event, success appears to be more tightly tied to major (all 100K jobs in engineering or finance) than the ranking of the schools. I'm sure Ivy kids are doing well and many have secure jobs lined up, but I don't know any of them and plenty of others are doing well.

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The school + career path + kids’ drive, ambition;  For Quants in finance career, a fresh graduate can earn $300k or more per year, but you have to go to top CS schools or the very top schools: MHPS, UChicago, Columbia and a few more second tier schools (including Yale) for this niche but super IQ area. Even Dartmouth/Brown students do not have much of a chance. No pipeline. [/quote]

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