Discussion for article #234829
I suspect it makes a real difference when youâre trying to get into a grad school, law school, business school, or med school.
When it comes to getting a job or launching a career, I know of at least some people for whom the âeliteâ university name provided a better shot at the initial position. But five years out, no one cares where you went to school - all that matters is whether youâre good at what youâre doing.
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While reading this article I did a flashback to the time I had to make a decision about where I wanted to go to college. Granted itâs been many moons since then, but I still needed to make a choice. Iâm glad the choice I made turned into reality. In my family, further education was a no-brainer. It was simply what you did because as a black person, an education was something no one could take away from you. It prepared you to deal with whatever this society threw at you.
My choice was simple, an HBCU. No others were even considered. So, I chose to apply to two. One I was declined at, no biggie. It was my second choice. I was accepted at my first choice. This one was at the top because family was close by, namely my Grandmom. Nothing like needing TLC when youâre away from home and who better than an expert at giving TLC. Not to mention being an awesome cook.
I graduated over 40 years ago from my alma mater. It was small and cozy. It also prepared me. The friendships made with my classmates continues today. Iâm still in contact with the chairman of my major department. The school has done well for an HBCU. The leaders over the years, took seriously their mission to maintain the high standards and keep the school well funded. To be honest, my alma mater always makes the U.S. News reports on the top 25 Best Colleges in the country for the dime spent. The mission of the school has grown over the years and she offers students experiences that werenât available to my generation. But thatâs okay, because as long as she fulfills her goals of providing a quality education that is all that matters. It pleases me that newer generations are being offered a solid foundation to go out into the world and make their marks.
Itâs not cheap, but itâs no way as expensive as some of the other âeliteâ schools in the country. But help is available and alumni do give back. When I see how much it costs to go to college now, I cringe. My parents were able to pay out of pocket. We were middle-class, not rich.
My school does have a wonderful history and she is considered to be an âeliteâ HBCU. But the environment she provides her students is solid and welcoming. Because itâs a small school, you donât get lost amongst thousands. You actually get to know people. I wouldnât trade the experience for anything in the world.
So true:
We would all be much better off if we stopped thinking of college as a lottery ticket to millions and instead what it really is: a dependable path to a middle- and upper-middle-class lifestyle, high employment rates and a host of other positive outcomes. Doing that would allow us to recognize how special any opportunity for a four-year education is and stop judging self-worth based on a flawed admissions process.
IU is a poor example. Itâhas very highly ranked graduate research training programs. It is not a great undergraduate institution. Tenured faculty rarely teach undergrads unless they are dead wood. The instate students are poorly prepared students from the East Coast who often are dumb as rocks. Students can get a good education if they work in a faculty memberâs âlabâ but frankly, a more tech-oriented university or a good second tier public institution would work much better. I taught at IU and would have found it a waste of time as an undergrad.
Prestigeous undergrad institutions make it easier even for their middling students to get into major graduate programs. My department at IU valued undergrad school over objective criteria. This is not unusual, in my experience with faculty elsewhere. In their case, it meant they had a surprising number of mediocre students. Turning âdoes it matterâ into a binary rather than recognizing that it is multidimensional is very problematic.
Not getting into one of these colleges is as much the result of a personal failing as is losing a presidential election to Vladimir Putin.
I love this sentence because in practice, nobody loves and admires Putin more than rich, Ivy League Republicans.
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First tier schools guarantee you a good job, connections, publishing deals, etc. The rest of us, regardless of where we matriculated, get to fight over the scraps.
Ainât America great?
Huzzah
The admissions process is just as silly at the top institutions as it is below the top. The reality is that any school that gets more applicants than it can admit does the same stuff: looks for some little thing that distinguishes one applicant from another. Hereâs what I think makes more sense: set a floor (minimum grades and test scores and essays written under controlled, ie proctored, conditions). Schools could also divide students by intended major and admit them to a major. Then have a lottery. What we now have is an actual lottery masquerading as a competition.
This piece makes a number of excellent observations, and definitely will be shared with many tense seniors who will find anxious ways to ignore its main points.
I teach at a large state university and have to disagree on the Scripps versus UNH tradeoff, though. Not because the privates are necessarily a better model, nor because of problems with the UNH faculty, but because the last three decades have seen such enormous disinvestment in state universities that reasonable class size and access to in demand classes have been the casualties. A student who is highly motivated can get the same education at both places, but the average student would actually be getting something significant for that cost difference. It doesnât have to be that way, but people donât want to pay for public education any more, and the results are starting to show.
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It also depends upon your major. I wouldnât waste time with Harvard or Yale if I was trying to get a degree in computer science or software engineering.
I went to Stanford. If I didnât have a scholarship, I could NEVER have afforded to go there, and this was almost 40 years ago when I went.
Of course it matters, its an important sorting mechanism for society, even if the value of said education is positional rather than intrinsic.
30 years into my career and people still care about where I graduated, amazingly
I agree. But for the first five years or so of your career that first position with that first firm can really push you down the road a piece.
The other thing not mentioned, particularly post-grad school, is that while the University of Indiana might have a nice endowment, there are likely more well-paid jobs available to recent grads in NYC, Boston or Seattle than there are in the entire state of Indiana and, as recent legislative activity has shown, who the hell wants to try to make a life in Fly Over Land save for a few cities? And now that Scott Walker is bent on destroying Wisconsin, youâre pretty much left with the Twin Cities. St. Louis? Cleveland? Des Moines? Oklahoma City?
Hereâs a time when it mattered: my son wanted to work for the Feds in the field of foreign affairs. Evidently there are a small group of universities whose grad degrees in the appropriate subjects bump you to the top of the list for consideration. The only two I remember at the moment are Harvard and Columbia, but there are a couple of others. He went to Columbia. Besides getting the job he wanted, a couple of interesting things came out of this:
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As a grad student he felt sorry for the undergrads. He came from a small undergrad-only university that was very student focused with lots of personal attention. He felt the undergrads at Columbia pretty much got crumbs.
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If the point of a fancy name school is to make lots of money, then you shouldnât plan to work for the Feds. With all the pay freezes and inflation, he effectively makes no more today than the first day he went to work a number of years ago. Lucky for us citizens, it was never the money for him, it was the desire to make a difference for the country. Odd, I know, but that was and is his motivation for putting up with his relative pittance. The same skill set would garner him buco bucks in the private sector, but he values working for his country. Lucky us.
I went to a college where it cost the least. That was UC Berkeley in the 1950s when the tuition was free. The student fees of $35 per semester also covered medical care.
There are so many variables in this. And donât forget timing, too, like graduating during a recession or when the draft is on, or having to fulfill an ROTC requirement or having family obligations like aged parents and on and on.
And trying to get advice thatâs valid is impossible. Two grandsons entering college have asked my 2 cents now and them.
I tread lightly and tell them frankly that what might have been good advice when I went to college is probably obsolete now.
I think itâs still good advice to get some science,stat, finance into the mix, for for chrissakes learn how to write, simple, correct and precise English. And some knowledge of epistemology helps too if they offer such things any more.
All that said, who cares what some old busybody thinks about anything?
Ben Miller and Frank Bruni (in his book) both refer to how worked up parents get about the college process. Speaking as a parent of a senior who is within hours of hearing from a set of elite colleges, I can tell you what has been burning at my soul: love. I/we love my/our children ferociously and proudly. They are a parentâs heartbeat. Itâs not really rational. So take the person you most love in the world who is about to be launched into the world as a young adult, and expose them to the college admissions process. Good life/learning experience? Probably. Is it easy to have to watch your kid endure something that runs counter to many of the important values and ideals that make good democratic citizens? No. Is it even possible to watch your kid get hurt - ever? Absolutely not. This separation can be brutal. I so wish that such a wondrous moment could be handled with greater deference to familial love.
Wait until your 17 yr old darling chooses a school 3000 miles from home as our daughter did. Now thatâs a big parental gulp!
In my experience it does, but not for the reasons you might think. I went to state schools for my degrees and now work at an âeliteâ school and have spent many years being involved in graduate (and a few years Med School) admissions. In my experience, there is little (although some) discussion about where an applicant comes from, but the differences in research experience is a major factor for graduate admissions. Students from elite research universities have numerous opportunities to be involved in research and those from elite small private institutions provide good research opportunities and know enough to send the students to summer programs to get additional experience.
At the medical school level, the differences are more stark. The elite universities know how to package applicants to get them into medical school. The students are coached on what they need in their application, who to get letters from and what to say in their interviews. Even the letter writers are provided with suggestions on what to write in their recommendations. Many universities, not just the elite ones, have a medical professions committee put the package together to send out to the medical schools. The elite schools put applications together that are so well packaged, it would be hard not to be impressed, whereas the students from other schools (including very good flagship state schools) are not nearly as well scripted.