And yet, at the same time, I don't think that they've ever had less to offer.
We're increasingly seeing highly critical re-evaluations of the current higher education paradigm, and we're increasingly at a point where an Ivy League diploma has little value save that of a status symbol. (One which basically says "I am conventionally-minded, inclined to do things the 'right' way, and I hold the correct opinions.")
Those places have even less to offer, to such an extent that a fresh diploma from such a school is damn close to a negative signal for intelligence and competence. (If not already past that threshold!)
There isn't enough room in the Ivy league schools for all the competent people in this country to have an Ivy degree, even if you kicked out all the 'legacy' admits.
If anyone's treating attending a non-Ivy school as a negative signal for competence, I can only treat that as a negative signal for their competence.
Which is also exactly what the colleges are saying themselves (on the surface). For example, MIT's rejection letter:
> Please understand that this is in no way a judgment of you as a student or as a person, since our decision has more to do with the applicant pool than anything else—many of our applicants are not offered admission simply because we don’t have enough space in our entering class.
If you want to get into Google, a degree from Stanford, Caltech, MIT, or school with similarly prestigious STEM programs will grease the skids. Matter of fact it's nearly a requirement unless you can elevate their ESG score (by being a visible and/or gender-identity or sexual-orientation minority).
Big Tech / FAANG employs only a fraction of university graduates each year though.
I have interviewed many candidates for a FAANG over several years, and I try to not bias myself on whether they went to an Ivy or not.
That said, I have also heard that some deca-unicorn gave up going to non prestigious schools for recruiting because the hit rate was low. This deca unicorn was previously proud of outsmarting other big companies by finding diamonds in the rough by recruiting at no name schools.
To some high schoolers reading this: I wouldn't discount the value of a prestigious school to 0. It is not a prerequisite for success, but it will likely make it easier.
Work at a F/G (not just “faang” because some companies like Amazon are not picky about pedigree at all) or in “hot” startups and you might disagree. A lot of people come from Ivy League schools and similar schools.
The value has never been about the actual teaching, it’s about the signaling. While many higher “ranked” schools are able to have more difficult courses due to being able to ask more of their students, it’s not so much that which adds value. Really companies just want the traits we associate with having gone to these schools: being well socialized, able to jump through hoops, having connections, a solid education and likely to be generally intelligent.
Of course you can have most of those traits without having ever heard of Dartmouth or Pickelball but the density of those traits coming out of Ivy leagues is high, and it’s reflected in industry (especially in finance, consulting, and academia). Just not so much generic SWE right now since even companies like F/G cannot meet hiring goals by limiting their candidate pool to these schools.
I don't understand this take. Surely, institutions are the place where the most cutting edge pure research is taking place? Why do people think institutions are where conformity is king?
AI will cull many universities in the classical sense, or turn them into something closer to a trade school. GPT and friends will grow to teach you everything at a fraction of the price.
Soon you won't need college for most disciplines outside of hard science, medical, and engineering. And in these you just need someone to walk you through the lab and make sure you don't injure yourself or others - something frequently left to TAs and no-pay assistants anyway.
AI is going to put a big strain on higher education.
To whatever extent that AI reduces the cost of providing a serviceable college education, I think that will further separate the reputation of the Ivy League and top 10 non-Ivy colleges from what is likely to be increasingly viewed as the AI-augmented utility college diploma mills.
How does AI replace the fact that you have to actually learn something? Sure I can ask a mythical AI to explain fourier transforms or bessel functions. But that doesn't mean I actually know it. A degree implies that you know at least a majority of a set of knowledge, you have learned to articulate your ideas, you have learned to stick it through the tough parts. AI does not replace that. We already have millions of courses on youtube, millions of tutorials online, what does AI offer that they don't? At minimum, a university provides the deadline to actually finish reading that book by monday, AND you must understand it enough to write that essay. AI can't offer that.
AI can replace the teachers, TAs and a large portion of the operational cost of colleges, that's for sure. Office hours 24/7 via conversational AI.
The process of learning and assessing that result can largely be automated once AI is sufficiently powerful. If you look at the pace of advancement, it's really not that far off. Pay $x to be certified in skill y, and learn towards that test via AI.
The only reason Colleges still exist in their current form is cultural inertia... an incredibly inefficient way to improve your skills
This is missing the point about where AI is about to take us.
Having a world class education in higher level intellectual pursuits is going to be worthless in the not too distant future. It's the upper echelon of education, work, and class that's rapidly going to be replaced by AI, and much later, the lower blue collar and technician jobs. Law, medicine, engineering, government policy, management, etc, are all on the chopping block.
No one will care that you have a degree of any kind from Harvard, not because Harvard is producing less quality than it used to, but because it primarily produces brains that know things, and the years and decades it takes to produce that in a human is simply not worth the effort when you can just ask ChatGPT 13.0 for a better answer than any human who ever lived could give on just about every subject.
ChatGPT is a massive threat to your doctor's job, not your nurse's job.
I strongly disagree with that assessment. Creativity is not going away and that’s never going to get replaced not because AI can’t do better but because that’s what makes us humans.
The way they encourage kids to live life based on the principle "this will look good on my CV" is also nothing short of evil. It should probably be illegal for degree-sellers to take into account any extra-curricular activities.
I would be exceedingly worried about someone trying to take medical advice from chatgpt, given that chatgpt's training data set will include anything from mayoclinic to mommy blogs to new age stuff. Similarly, I worry about law, because chatgpt's training data will include old/expired laws mix with supreme court opinions mixed with sovreign citizens nonsense.
I consider ChatGPT to simply be a word like Kleenex or Google at this point. A brand name that has become synonymous with the generic.
Also, don't discount the vast amount of cooky doctors and lawyers with fully legitimate licenses. The humans who occupy these roles make countless mistakes, and so will and AI version, at least initially.
At least if a doctor or a lawyer gives you bald-faced wrong information that meaningfully harms you, you have some, limited recourse, and that doctor/lawyer takes on some, limited risk if they're found to be straight up negligent. With ChatGPT there is no recourse and no risk to spew harmful falsehoods.
[To be clear: I state how limited this is because if doctors were genuinely held to give beyond cover-your-ass standard of care, there would be way less medically traumatized disabled people out there. Unfortunately...]
You can already get a world-class education for free, all you need to do is to walk into your local library, check out the books that are on the reading list for the courses that constitute a 4-year undergraduate degree. Then, read each chapter three times. Then, solve the problems at the end of the chapter.
This will cost you roughly $0.
What you can't get is world-class instruction for free.
In many universities the instruction you are given is generally pretty lame. Outstanding courses exist in most unis but most of the time you get very little personal help. It's just how it is, and one of their goals is trying to teach you to become able to learn by yourself by working through those books. I think the most important thing they offer is a structure. Not just random courses but ideally some clear buildup for coherent knowledge.
Universal education in the US is almost entirely about entry into the professional-managerial class and vanishingly involved in actual training or education.
For most people, there are no other straightforward paths to this class of society, so even if this price tag puts the student in debt for much of their life, it is still rational to pay this price. A poor middle class person is marginally better-off than a poor working class person in the US.
There is a fairly straightforward path for a poor working class person to get some experience in the skilled trades and then start their own contracting business. This will usually leave them better off than your ”poor middle class person". Enlisting in the military is also a straightforward path into the middle class, and outside of combat arms it's not even particularly dangerous.
With the current level of elite overproduction, a college degree is hardly a guarantee of entry into the professional-managerial class. It's just an opportunity to compete for entry, nothing more.
(Education does have other benefits beyond class mobility and career training.)
Starting your own business is a big risk. This is also merely a chance to compete for entry.
Joining the military is not only a physical risk, you are also joining an organization with a pyramidal structure: you may not get that promotion.
Getting educated seems like the easiest thing to do, because it's a continuation of what most kids have done. Maybe it suffers from the same pyramid issue, but it's not obvious to all the kids.
What's your point? There are no guarantees in life. Those other paths are no more risky or less straightforward than going to college and then trying to get a professional-managerial corporate job.
Starting a small contracting business is hardly a big risk. Capital requirements are fairly low to start picking up small jobs. In my area the ones who show up on time and do quality work are constantly busy. When those businesses fail it's usually because the owner had some kind of personal problem (substance abuse), or because they gamble on real estate development and overextend their credit.
As for the military, anyone who stays in 20 years and follows orders without screwing up too badly will earn promotion to at least E-6. They can also take college courses along the way, and will get pretty good retirement benefits.
Adults have a moral responsibility to tell kids that there are options other than going to college. Make it obvious. There's certainly nothing wrong with going to college for many kids, but it shouldn't be the default path just because they don't know what else to do.
> Joining the military is not only a physical risk, you are also joining an organization with a pyramidal structure: you may not get that promotion.
It’s not that hard to get
promoted to a level that can get one to a decent early retirement (e7 or o5).
- Be moderately intelligent. Not genius level, just enough to past the various tests in your MOS and rank. If one is on the threshold for not being able to do this intellectually, it will usually be apparent early in one’s career.
- Be fit. Some people get lazy on this point, some get injured, but it’s usually an issue of personal motivation (or lack thereof).
- Minimize fuck ups — drugs, DUIs, run ins with the law, etc. Sometimes these are overlooked, sometimes not. Better not to risk it.
- Make sure to make time to go to all the right “charm schools”. Sounds silly, but sometimes you have to fight for it.
> Maybe it suffers from the same pyramid issue, but it's not obvious to all the kids.
I very much agree with this.
There is a very distinct socio-economic pyramid in the US, and most people don’t really understand what they need to do to move up the ladder.
It’s not as easy as going to an elite school. There is way more to it, and I think that surprises a lot of people when they are middle-aged and realize that they didn’t really understand the rules of the game.
Maybe, but it's arguably easier to become a comfortable working class person in the US (plumber, electrician, etc.) than it is to become a comfortable professional/managerial class person if you're walking away from school a quarter million or $300k in debt and your first ~decade of work you're looking at making $50-60k/yr.
My family was caught in the middle "too poor to pay for it; too high income to attend for free". (Both my parents were public school teachers; we were not worried about putting food on the table but were hardly rolling in it...)
This might be true for the Ivy leagues, but from what limited research I had done 20ish years ago, many private colleges talked a whole lot about the aid they offered and didn't deliver if you had even a moderately middle class family.
I don't know if either that's actually true, or just how poor you have to be to be considered middle or low income, but I'm on the college application treadmill and the schools seem to consider you "high income" if you bring in enough income to pay for the cost of college, whether or not there's anything left over afterward.
Not sure how true this is. Perhaps it doesn't count for internationals? But at least one person I know paid pretty much full price despite coming from a humble background.
> state schools charging $40K a year for out of state tuition
To be fair, they're often offering much cheaper rates to in-state students. Their parents and the students themselves are presumably paying taxes. They also hope the students continue to live in the state and pay taxes.
If the out of state student becomes a resident, they get in-state rates.
Out of state students aren't subsidized by taxes and might leave.
Also, if you establish residency in the state for a year, you get in-state tuition prices, at least in the state I went to school. Effectively that $40K is just for the first year.
I'm paying more for my kid to go to a middling out-of-state university for 1 year than the total value of my own 4-year out-of-state full scholarship with stipend 29 years ago.
There's got to be some P/E valuation ratio applied to universities. What schools give you the most bang for the buck, if your goal in college is mostly preparing for a career (as opposed to purely educational, intellectual broadening, social aspects etc.)? Maybe something that compares tuition cost and acceptance rate with alumni donation rate. Tuition cost is straightforward, but acceptance rate also measures a "cost" in how much effort it takes to get into (like a time cost of studying). Alumni donation rate shows how much disposable income grads have, as well as how much they attribute it to their university.
Around Seattle, it seems like a lot of Western Washington University grads get into great tech companies, while not being hard to get into. Tuition isn't that low though.
The biggest issue is selection bias. Most people that go to Harvard are smart and hard working. And most of their success is due to this as opposed to due to getting into Harvard.
But I would love to see a value add model looking at the salaries of people who barely got into Harvard vs those who barely didn't and compare that to the cost of tuition.
Years to get paid back, total return, return vs S&P 500.
As summarized by the Atlantic: "For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
This finding suggests that the talents and ambitions of individual students are worth more than the resources and renown of elite schools. Or, less academically, the person you’re becoming at 18 is a better predictor of your future success than the school you graduate from at 22. The takeaway here: Stress out about your habits and chill out about college."
To be fair, the Atlantic continues on to say that the effect is different for women (which they ascribe primarily to increased workforce participation rates [the paper is almost 25 years old now, so read that as "increased participation in the Carter->Clinton era]").
I think this depends on when you enter the labor market. Entry level jobs seem to often have a cutoff point of "good enough." During bad years like 2010 you need every leg up possible, including bullshit reputational advantage. During boom years like early 2022 a code diploma mill and a pulse gets you in the same door. Once you make it through the first door (assuming you last at least a year or so) to an extent you're a "made man" it becomes more about your next step.
i'd say that the "average" outcomes would likely be the same for two "similar" people, one who attends a prestigious school and one who attends a state school but i'd say the probability of becoming "wildly successful" is much higher at the prestigious school (even if the overall probability of becoming "wildly successful" is small)
Dale & Krueger and its descendants are based on a college cohort from 1976. It reflects the college goers of the 70s (not only male-heavy but white-heavy) and economic history as it applied to the Boomer generation. My personal expectation is that the higher ed sector, by collectively shunting high-achieving middle class students to lower-tier schools because “they will have the same outcomes” according to this line of research, will turn out to have contributed to substantial downward mobility in that segment.
The Price you Pay for College by Ron Lieber has some interesting background. Essentially, some colleges started raising tuition and then offering more financial aid and discount packages. This made them appear to be providing more to the students who got aid packages and they selected those schools more often. For the wealthy families who could afford the higher prices, they also felt the schools were more selective. The other colleges soon followed in order to maintain their perceived value.
The second driver is the student loan system where the government has allowed special rules that make it almost impossible for lenders to lose. The lenders offer huge loans without regard for the ability to repay because they know they are protected.
This is basically what health insurance companies do. They want higher billed rates from hospitals so that they can offer better "discounts." In reality, no one pays the billed rates.
Irrational? You're angry because they're trying to mislead you into thinking that "insurance" is covering 97% of a large bill. When in reality, they're only covering 60% of a small bill.
Obfuscating how that process works is a huge problem. It's how they extract lots of value out of the consumer, and why Americans pay more than most socialized medical systems while having on-par or worse outcomes.
Take a look at the list of Fortune 500 companies and notice how many are healthcare related. There is a reason it's never going to get better.
>some colleges started raising tuition and then offering more financial aid and discount packages.
This isn't necessarily a nefarious thing. For example, Harvard is famous for its goal of tuition never being a blocker for someone attending. Therefore an increase in the sticker price doesn't affect many people outside high income and net worth individuals and families. This just shifts a higher percentage of the costs to the people who can actually afford it which is generally good. If you want me to be concerned about the tuition costs of these elite private schools, at least tell me the median tuition paid and not the amount paid by the ultra affluent.
An increase in the sticker price certainly eats up outside scholarships and loans. Harvard (and other ivies) may have eliminated student and parent loans for most undergraduates, but master's and professional students (and possibly their parents) often have to take out loans. And a large sticker price often means that the university simply pockets the entire amount of outside scholarships, deducting it from financial "need".
See also: the housing market. Just another of life's necessities the usurers have got in on so that they can leech of the productive members of society by introducing limitless competitive expenditure, for their own gain.
If you think of Ivy League colleges (plus MIT, Stanford) as places where students learn, then this tuition is non-sense. If you think of them as 4-year recruiting agencies, then it makes sense. A lot of employers think "if this guy was good enough for Yale, he's probably good for me too". Of course they go on an interview people, but Ivy League act as great filters. At zero cost for employers.
What is baffling to me is the value proposition of second tier colleges which charge pretty much the same tuition as the first tier. Have you heard of Wake Forest University? According to the US News ranking [1], it is ranked at 29 among "National Universities" and charges a tuition of $62k. If you were to see a resume of a candidate graduating from Wake Forest, would you jump on it?
(Note: I don't want to dis Wake Forest U. I just found it on google minutes ago, I don't think I heard about it until now, and I have no idea if it's good or bad. But it certainly does not have the name recognition of Yale, for me, at least)
Arguably a university like that is even worse than a state school. At least I've heard of University of Arizona or UT Austin (both decent state research schools).
If you're even mildly aware of college sports you've heard of Wake Forest. And like many schools in the Southeast, the name means more locally. Also, not everyone has to become a developer.
And this is one of the main reasons schools spend money on sports. It is a very cost-efficient form of marketing. I'm not just aware of the name Wake Forrest because of sports, but I know that it is a tough academic school and think highly of its graduates because of sports.
This is exactly why I don't follow college sports. In my honest opinion sports is an important aspect of life but the place for it is not in academia (whether used for marketing or not). It really devalues and even humiliates the academic institutions and their research if all you know about them is that they've got a good sports team.
> It really devalues and even humiliates the academic institutions and their research if all you know about them is that they've got a good sports team.
I think you misunderstood my point. Sports was my introduction to the school. That does not mean sports is the only thing I know about the school. I learned about their academic reputation because of sports.
Oh well it doesn’t really matter if one person from the internet hasnt heard of it, wake forest even has a medical school.
Thinking of how “good” an institution is based on name recognition doesn’t scale that well or mean that much. What about McGill University or Reed College?
Not trying to be snarky or rude it’s just not a solid metric to gauge things like this based on personal familiarity, given how vast the world is.
i think OP's point was just about ROI from going to a certain school. Wake forest might be a great school but paying 60-65k per year to go there isn't what i would say is a good move financially. Just my personal opinion but if a person's talent and skill are kept constant, then the difference in life outcomes (financially, professionally) for that person from going to wake forest vs going to a tier 3 school which is much cheaper is probably not that great. On the other end, going to MIT could affect your life in a significant way, maybe your roomate is the next Bill Gates.
The whole point is only the ultra-rich (or woefully ignorant) are paying the full retail price for college. Very few people are paying $65K to go to Wake Forest. If they want you then they'll make it affordable for you. If they don't want you then the retail price should drive you away. If you're a sucker then they'll gladly take your money. That's the game colleges have been playing for at least the last 40 years.
That was kind of my point, McGill is one of the most prestigious universities in Canada/North America/the world and most Americans would have never heard of it
"state school" doesn't have anything to do with the name having the word "state" in it.
it means the school is funded by the individual states; it's not private.
U of Texas is absolutely and unquestionable a state school -- it is funded and run by the state of Texas. People absolutely would refer to it in the category of "state schools" -- it's not a private institution compared to something like Rice or Baylor.
We’re both right and I mentioned they’re obviously state run institutions. if someone in Michigan says “I go to state” someone isn’t gonna reply “oh University of Michigan or michigan state?”
Edit: in California the csu (California state university) system is considered the state university system and is different organizationally than the UC (university of California) system. Though they’re both public state run institutions.
I'm originally from the mid-Atlantic and have heard of Wake Forest, mainly in the context of the NC Research Triangle (Wake is kinda outside of the Triangle, but close enough).
And also basketball.
But ask me what they do well there in a research or academic sense... no idea. Why you'd chose to go there instead of one of the big state schools in the Triangle (or Duke, which is private) is unknown.
Wake Forest is reasonably well-known and well-regarded in the Southeast, but not say at the level of Duke (another private NC university), and definitely not nationally.
For Ivy Leagues and similar top tier (Berkeley/Caltech/Duke/MIT/Stanford/), you can go there to study anything and the school name will carry you even if your particular program is not as well-regarded as its counterpart at large state universities.
But if your choice is between an expensive mid-tier private university or a state university, then your best strategy is figure out what you want to study and which option has the most well-regarded program for that course, both among academia and industry. But that takes some real due diligence and digging for a high schooler to figure out.
I'm not sure if a comparison to the ivy schools is relevant: yes, there are certainly more prestigious schools out there.
I suppose anything depends on the job you're hiring for, as well: they're better at finance than engineering. The us news rankings are partially based on how well-known a college is though. So, yes, there are plenty of people out there who would hire from that college over better known state schools.
Yes, I've heard of it, though honestly more in the context of ACC basketball. I did know a graduate long ago, and understand that she was quite good at her work.
> About 55% of Harvard students receive need-based scholarship aid with average grant totals around $53,000.
>
> The school states that families with students who receive scholarship funds pay an average of $12,000 towards their education per year and that students from families that earn between $65,000 and $150,000 typically contribute between 0% to 10% of their income towards the cost of attending Harvard each year.
I wonder what the average out-of-pocket cost is to attend these institutions.
I did the analysis for Princeton once - the average out of pocket cost was $15,000 per year. That has remained constant even as sticker prices (and the cost per student) has escalated.
What people don't appreciate is how much expense per student has skyrocketed in the last 20 years. Princeton has about 100 more student sports staffers, and spends about $45,000 per year per student in student services. Library expenses have also escalated far faster than inflation.
I went to a state school in the mid 90s and I remember seeing a breakdown of tuition costs. Half of the cost was whatever the school council / student body decided was a good idea over the years. I can't imagine the percentage it is now. It was a good lesson in politics and political spending / budgeting.
> Financial aid, in the form of grants, scholarships, loans and work-study programs
Heavy on the _loans_, light on the grants and scholarships. My son graduated valedictorian and scored in the top 4% on the SAT (and had athletics, and had community service, and had national honor society, etc. etc.) was offered about $2000 _total_ (of the $50K/year price tag, so about 1% of the total cost) in scholarships. He didn't apply to Harvard, but I don't believe for a second they're throwing around any more money than Purdue or Michigan are. Edit: and those two scholarships came from his high school, not the colleges he was applying to.
Can you imagine any other product where when you ask the price, the answer is: "How much money do you have?"
Insane. Basically this traps people who are about $200k or so to spending HUGELY on their kids education. And what they also don't say is that if you have assets they expect to take 5% per year per kid in college as a minimum contribution.
Healthcare in the US apparently. At least it seems from my relatives that this is also the type of thing where you get a huge bill and then talk it down.
I was set to go to an Ivy League school 12 years ago and a couple years after the 08 recession. Back then, tuition, combined with room & board came out to $50k a year. I ended up backing out and following a less conventional path because I couldn't afford tuition. It's hard to imagine that we're now seeing $90k a year now in 2023. It's just absolutely ludicrous. College in this country is a scam.
The reply to this is always "but only rich people pay list price, everyone else gets 'financial aid'". (Really, it's just price discrimination, since the school is 'aiding' themselves.) And my reply to that is, "the school has zero obligation to give you anything; you can attend for three years, and then as a senior, have your 'aid' canceled just because the school feels like it." My school kept trying to cancel my 'aid', midway through my degree, because of rounding errors in my parents' tax returns (which I had no control over).
Anecdotally I can confirm that "financial aid" mostly just means loans. There are no full rides, at least not to any of the schools that can afford to be "picky".
Quite a few comments talk about education and knowledge, but from my personal experience that’s not the main thing these colleges offer. It’s the connections, the circles you build and a jump start into a “better life” (fairly subjective too, I would say).
I'm a Brown grad, who graduated in the mid 90's. In the mid 90's, Brown's tuition was an unthinkable $32k/year, if I remember correctly. As an immigrant with no family assets, I got a big financial aid package, and being a Rhode Islander, I also got a state grant, and took the rest as loans. It was just barely doable for someone who didn't have family assets. Today, it seems truly impossible.
Since I'm from Providence, I visit Brown regularly when I visit my family, since I have lots of memories from the time. Today's campus looks very little like it did in the 90's. We had dumpy dorms, crappy cafeterias, and rather plain, but functional buildings. Today, the dorms have been renovated or rebuilt to be much more luxurious, the school has built a number of incredibly opulent buildings, and there's just a whole lot more space and more wealth on display. The total enrollment went from somewhere around 8,000 then to about 10,000 today, so it's not that they're building these things to handle more students.
It seems that per-student spending has gone way up, and they're now providing a luxury education experience, not just a degree.
It's an Ivy League, there is an implied class -- and I ain't talkin about school.
There are lifestyle expectations, either because the well off folks expect it, or those trying to gain a foothold believe that to be something that they have / will have earned.
A HS friend of mine went to Penn and for a brief period of time was an admissions counsellor there. She said many times that if you were smart enough to get in, the administration would do everything in its power to get you whatever grants, scholarships, and loans you needed to get in. She was there probably 7 or 8 years and could recall less than 1/yr where someone was admitted but did not attend due to cost.
Mediocre colleges will leave you on your own 99% of the time but if you're good enough to get into an Ivy or a similarly leveled school like Stanford or MIT it's very unlikely that cost will be the determining factor (not that it will be easy of course).
are there any plausible efforts out there (eg rough equivalent of an activist investor) attempting to convince universities to curb their addiction to hiring armies of administrative employees who (often) do nothing and (often) are paid several X what a phd candidate receives as a stipend
are there any meaningful ways to change the incentives to something other than raise as much money as possible to hire more administrative employees to raise as much money as possible?
(also if my premise is flawed and there are other things that contribute significantly to the burn of universities lmk)
It is not admin staff - overheads have generally been constant as a % of other expenses. The biggest components of cost escalation are MUCH higher spending on student services (3x at Princeton in the last 20 years), library expenses, and staff benefits cost escalation.
I am right now visiting McGill University in Canada with my son. He's applying to all the top universities in US, but McGill is a breath of fresh air:
A)They admit by strict gpa and SAT criteria. No essays needed! Got top scores, you are in!
B) they are cheap. For international, it's $32k Canadian tuition. This is almost roughly equivalent to in state tuition at U Michigan. For Quebecers, the tuition and fees are around $5k Canadian!
C) it's huge. 40k kids. And they are all the top kids. Canada builds big schools and just gets shit done.
The US system is just such BS. On our tour, the entire group was American, half of whom we're waiting on decisions from Ivy's which are released this week. It's crazy that the US is essentially inviting top students to leave the country for a great but much cheaper education.
Definitely agree with all the advantages you describe. There's no reason to not consider UToronto, McGill, Waterloo, UBC, etc except perhaps that they don't use common app (though if I recall the application process was supposed to be much easier).
>it's huge. 40k kids. And they are all the top kids. Canada builds big schools and just gets shit done
If you have a kid who wants more of a small school vibe I think that's also possible. I didn't go, but UToronto does residential colleges more like Oxbridge, I'd imagine that helps greatly w/ encouraging socializing.
Might check out UToronto, thanks. We are east coasters and honestly also love the vibe of Montreal. So it is a wonderful school - surprised it is not more overrun by Americans (who represent less than half the internationals here.) Drinking age of 18, cheap cost of living, and hip areas like Plateau make it an awesome choice.
Applications could NOT be easier. Send in transcript and SAT. Done. (And if you are well above the cutoffs from last year, KNOW you will be accepted. No drama.)
According to their admissions website they have strict GPA minimums but there is no guarantee (which is how I interpreted the statement "Got top scores, you are in!")
Additionally they don't require the SATs at although prior to COVID they also had a minimum score for that.
Incorrect - in discussing with admissions team they rank order the applicants based on their criteria (grades, SAT, and rigor of curriculum) and admit in a rolling basis from top of list down until they hit their capacity. So while the cutoffs vary year by year, if your scores are top scores you WILL get admitted (e.g, you cannot get any higher than a perfect GPA and a 1600 SAT.) They extended the SAT optional policy for this year, but expect it to be back next year according to most.
They will even admit in tranches at different times in the year. So if you are a top applicant you will find out earlier (early Jan) while those on the margin have to wait.
I went to McGill as an American and I think it was a great choice. I mostly applied on a lark since, as you said, it was very easy to apply. Also as you said, tuition was a lot cheaper than comparable schools in America. Living in Montreal felt like I'd moved somewhere more like Europe, but it was still easy to visit family in Philadelphia.
I've seen a couple comments mention it, but the Ivies offer incredible needs based aid.
I come from a solidly upper middle class family and my brother is attending an Ivy for less than $10k out of pocket a year. This has really benefitted him as he can get a degree that he wants to without having to worry about the burdens of student loans. No other school he got into afforded him that opportunity- good state schools would have cost more.
There are a lot of caveats: we might be lucky to be in the exact income bracket for cheap tuition (although I do want to stress, the income bracket is fairly high), this financial aid could change at any point, the campus does feel excessive at times. But this opportunity has been the biggest positive influence on his life, and produced a well rounded man who was able to explore his interests . WAI from my perspective
There’s this gap between ~$150k HH income (where the good aid disappears) and whatever you think it takes to afford $90k/year and still support the rest of your nuclear family. That gap covers a lot of the HN population so I think you can see why people here are salty when the upper end of the gap is receding so fast there’s a red-shift.
It should be obvious that college is over-priced and the ROI is questionable...
...yet...
...parents still send their kids to college.
In other words - we are the problem, not the colleges.
Unless your kids want to be a doctor, lawyer, management consultant, or investment banker, then the influence college will have over your kid's career will be minimal. Nowadays, many trade skills pay more than what a college grad earns after graduation.
If you think cost of college is a problem, put your money where your mouth is and encourage your kids to do something different. I know I will.
According to this once you hit 300k or so family income you get nothing, even if your living in NYC.
So that's just 2 6 figure earners raising a family. 200k for a single person isn't rich. I can't imagine having an extra 80k per year as a family of 4 making 300k.
With that much money you could attend state school, save 60k a year and buy a house once you graduate ( down payment anyway).
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadWe're increasingly seeing highly critical re-evaluations of the current higher education paradigm, and we're increasingly at a point where an Ivy League diploma has little value save that of a status symbol. (One which basically says "I am conventionally-minded, inclined to do things the 'right' way, and I hold the correct opinions.")
If anyone's treating attending a non-Ivy school as a negative signal for competence, I can only treat that as a negative signal for their competence.
> Please understand that this is in no way a judgment of you as a student or as a person, since our decision has more to do with the applicant pool than anything else—many of our applicants are not offered admission simply because we don’t have enough space in our entering class.
Maybe in some industries. I will be more convinced if entry class of big successful banks like Goldman Sachs isn't full of ivy grads.
I personally know people that have flunked phone screens and were given the benefit of the doubt because they went to prestigious schools.
Ivy league is about as useful of a signal as a state school at this point.
If you want to get into Google, a degree from Stanford, Caltech, MIT, or school with similarly prestigious STEM programs will grease the skids. Matter of fact it's nearly a requirement unless you can elevate their ESG score (by being a visible and/or gender-identity or sexual-orientation minority).
I have interviewed many candidates for a FAANG over several years, and I try to not bias myself on whether they went to an Ivy or not.
That said, I have also heard that some deca-unicorn gave up going to non prestigious schools for recruiting because the hit rate was low. This deca unicorn was previously proud of outsmarting other big companies by finding diamonds in the rough by recruiting at no name schools.
To some high schoolers reading this: I wouldn't discount the value of a prestigious school to 0. It is not a prerequisite for success, but it will likely make it easier.
I think you're wrong about that.
Working in SV startup space, you can see that there's a lot of social value placed on an Ivy pedigree.
I'd make the case that an Ivy is less important for the higher education than it is for the network and social value gained.
The value has never been about the actual teaching, it’s about the signaling. While many higher “ranked” schools are able to have more difficult courses due to being able to ask more of their students, it’s not so much that which adds value. Really companies just want the traits we associate with having gone to these schools: being well socialized, able to jump through hoops, having connections, a solid education and likely to be generally intelligent.
Of course you can have most of those traits without having ever heard of Dartmouth or Pickelball but the density of those traits coming out of Ivy leagues is high, and it’s reflected in industry (especially in finance, consulting, and academia). Just not so much generic SWE right now since even companies like F/G cannot meet hiring goals by limiting their candidate pool to these schools.
Soon you won't need college for most disciplines outside of hard science, medical, and engineering. And in these you just need someone to walk you through the lab and make sure you don't injure yourself or others - something frequently left to TAs and no-pay assistants anyway.
AI is going to put a big strain on higher education.
If you need it to provide deadlines for you, then there's something wrong. Not that deadlines can't automatically be created on the cheap either.
I've hired a lot of folks whose highest level of education was high school. And they work right along MIT and Stanford grads just fine.
The process of learning and assessing that result can largely be automated once AI is sufficiently powerful. If you look at the pace of advancement, it's really not that far off. Pay $x to be certified in skill y, and learn towards that test via AI.
The only reason Colleges still exist in their current form is cultural inertia... an incredibly inefficient way to improve your skills
Having a world class education in higher level intellectual pursuits is going to be worthless in the not too distant future. It's the upper echelon of education, work, and class that's rapidly going to be replaced by AI, and much later, the lower blue collar and technician jobs. Law, medicine, engineering, government policy, management, etc, are all on the chopping block.
No one will care that you have a degree of any kind from Harvard, not because Harvard is producing less quality than it used to, but because it primarily produces brains that know things, and the years and decades it takes to produce that in a human is simply not worth the effort when you can just ask ChatGPT 13.0 for a better answer than any human who ever lived could give on just about every subject.
ChatGPT is a massive threat to your doctor's job, not your nurse's job.
Also, don't discount the vast amount of cooky doctors and lawyers with fully legitimate licenses. The humans who occupy these roles make countless mistakes, and so will and AI version, at least initially.
[To be clear: I state how limited this is because if doctors were genuinely held to give beyond cover-your-ass standard of care, there would be way less medically traumatized disabled people out there. Unfortunately...]
This will cost you roughly $0.
What you can't get is world-class instruction for free.
For most people, there are no other straightforward paths to this class of society, so even if this price tag puts the student in debt for much of their life, it is still rational to pay this price. A poor middle class person is marginally better-off than a poor working class person in the US.
With the current level of elite overproduction, a college degree is hardly a guarantee of entry into the professional-managerial class. It's just an opportunity to compete for entry, nothing more.
(Education does have other benefits beyond class mobility and career training.)
Joining the military is not only a physical risk, you are also joining an organization with a pyramidal structure: you may not get that promotion.
Getting educated seems like the easiest thing to do, because it's a continuation of what most kids have done. Maybe it suffers from the same pyramid issue, but it's not obvious to all the kids.
Starting a small contracting business is hardly a big risk. Capital requirements are fairly low to start picking up small jobs. In my area the ones who show up on time and do quality work are constantly busy. When those businesses fail it's usually because the owner had some kind of personal problem (substance abuse), or because they gamble on real estate development and overextend their credit.
As for the military, anyone who stays in 20 years and follows orders without screwing up too badly will earn promotion to at least E-6. They can also take college courses along the way, and will get pretty good retirement benefits.
Adults have a moral responsibility to tell kids that there are options other than going to college. Make it obvious. There's certainly nothing wrong with going to college for many kids, but it shouldn't be the default path just because they don't know what else to do.
It’s not that hard to get promoted to a level that can get one to a decent early retirement (e7 or o5).
- Be moderately intelligent. Not genius level, just enough to past the various tests in your MOS and rank. If one is on the threshold for not being able to do this intellectually, it will usually be apparent early in one’s career.
- Be fit. Some people get lazy on this point, some get injured, but it’s usually an issue of personal motivation (or lack thereof).
- Minimize fuck ups — drugs, DUIs, run ins with the law, etc. Sometimes these are overlooked, sometimes not. Better not to risk it.
- Make sure to make time to go to all the right “charm schools”. Sounds silly, but sometimes you have to fight for it.
> Maybe it suffers from the same pyramid issue, but it's not obvious to all the kids.
I very much agree with this.
There is a very distinct socio-economic pyramid in the US, and most people don’t really understand what they need to do to move up the ladder.
It’s not as easy as going to an elite school. There is way more to it, and I think that surprises a lot of people when they are middle-aged and realize that they didn’t really understand the rules of the game.
Middle-income or low income can go for basically free or the equivalent of 'at-cost' for room and board.
The price (30-40k a year) is equivalent to a lot of good state schools in-state (Berkeley, UVA, UMich, etc) at about 180-200k family income.
[0]https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works/type...
To be fair, they're often offering much cheaper rates to in-state students. Their parents and the students themselves are presumably paying taxes. They also hope the students continue to live in the state and pay taxes.
If the out of state student becomes a resident, they get in-state rates.
Out of state students aren't subsidized by taxes and might leave.
Around Seattle, it seems like a lot of Western Washington University grads get into great tech companies, while not being hard to get into. Tuition isn't that low though.
But I would love to see a value add model looking at the salaries of people who barely got into Harvard vs those who barely didn't and compare that to the cost of tuition.
Years to get paid back, total return, return vs S&P 500.
As summarized by the Atlantic: "For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
This finding suggests that the talents and ambitions of individual students are worth more than the resources and renown of elite schools. Or, less academically, the person you’re becoming at 18 is a better predictor of your future success than the school you graduate from at 22. The takeaway here: Stress out about your habits and chill out about college."
To be fair, the Atlantic continues on to say that the effect is different for women (which they ascribe primarily to increased workforce participation rates [the paper is almost 25 years old now, so read that as "increased participation in the Carter->Clinton era]").
There's also a 2011 update to the paper.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w17159
I was hoping someone ran a real time version of this as a comparable to the US News college report.
The second driver is the student loan system where the government has allowed special rules that make it almost impossible for lenders to lose. The lenders offer huge loans without regard for the ability to repay because they know they are protected.
https://www.amazon.com/Price-You-Pay-College-Financial/dp/00...
Doctor billed: $1500 Insurance allowed: $125 Insurance paid: $75 Your copay: $50
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket
Take a look at the list of Fortune 500 companies and notice how many are healthcare related. There is a reason it's never going to get better.
This isn't necessarily a nefarious thing. For example, Harvard is famous for its goal of tuition never being a blocker for someone attending. Therefore an increase in the sticker price doesn't affect many people outside high income and net worth individuals and families. This just shifts a higher percentage of the costs to the people who can actually afford it which is generally good. If you want me to be concerned about the tuition costs of these elite private schools, at least tell me the median tuition paid and not the amount paid by the ultra affluent.
What is baffling to me is the value proposition of second tier colleges which charge pretty much the same tuition as the first tier. Have you heard of Wake Forest University? According to the US News ranking [1], it is ranked at 29 among "National Universities" and charges a tuition of $62k. If you were to see a resume of a candidate graduating from Wake Forest, would you jump on it?
(Note: I don't want to dis Wake Forest U. I just found it on google minutes ago, I don't think I heard about it until now, and I have no idea if it's good or bad. But it certainly does not have the name recognition of Yale, for me, at least)
[1] https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/wake-forest-2978
I've literally never heard of Wake Forest.
I think you misunderstood my point. Sports was my introduction to the school. That does not mean sports is the only thing I know about the school. I learned about their academic reputation because of sports.
Source: American in Canada, have a buncha in-laws who went to McGill.
No idea what Reed College is.
Didn't Steve Jobs drop out of Reed?
Don’t think people would refer to UT or UoA as state schools
They’re all massive state run institutions though
it means the school is funded by the individual states; it's not private.
U of Texas is absolutely and unquestionable a state school -- it is funded and run by the state of Texas. People absolutely would refer to it in the category of "state schools" -- it's not a private institution compared to something like Rice or Baylor.
Edit: in California the csu (California state university) system is considered the state university system and is different organizationally than the UC (university of California) system. Though they’re both public state run institutions.
And also basketball.
But ask me what they do well there in a research or academic sense... no idea. Why you'd chose to go there instead of one of the big state schools in the Triangle (or Duke, which is private) is unknown.
For Ivy Leagues and similar top tier (Berkeley/Caltech/Duke/MIT/Stanford/), you can go there to study anything and the school name will carry you even if your particular program is not as well-regarded as its counterpart at large state universities.
But if your choice is between an expensive mid-tier private university or a state university, then your best strategy is figure out what you want to study and which option has the most well-regarded program for that course, both among academia and industry. But that takes some real due diligence and digging for a high schooler to figure out.
I suppose anything depends on the job you're hiring for, as well: they're better at finance than engineering. The us news rankings are partially based on how well-known a college is though. So, yes, there are plenty of people out there who would hire from that college over better known state schools.
> Financial aid, in the form of grants, scholarships, loans and work-study programs, closes the gap for many.
From https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/05/it-costs-78200-to-go-to-harv...:
> About 55% of Harvard students receive need-based scholarship aid with average grant totals around $53,000. > > The school states that families with students who receive scholarship funds pay an average of $12,000 towards their education per year and that students from families that earn between $65,000 and $150,000 typically contribute between 0% to 10% of their income towards the cost of attending Harvard each year.
I wonder what the average out-of-pocket cost is to attend these institutions.
What people don't appreciate is how much expense per student has skyrocketed in the last 20 years. Princeton has about 100 more student sports staffers, and spends about $45,000 per year per student in student services. Library expenses have also escalated far faster than inflation.
Heavy on the _loans_, light on the grants and scholarships. My son graduated valedictorian and scored in the top 4% on the SAT (and had athletics, and had community service, and had national honor society, etc. etc.) was offered about $2000 _total_ (of the $50K/year price tag, so about 1% of the total cost) in scholarships. He didn't apply to Harvard, but I don't believe for a second they're throwing around any more money than Purdue or Michigan are. Edit: and those two scholarships came from his high school, not the colleges he was applying to.
Insane. Basically this traps people who are about $200k or so to spending HUGELY on their kids education. And what they also don't say is that if you have assets they expect to take 5% per year per kid in college as a minimum contribution.
Since I'm from Providence, I visit Brown regularly when I visit my family, since I have lots of memories from the time. Today's campus looks very little like it did in the 90's. We had dumpy dorms, crappy cafeterias, and rather plain, but functional buildings. Today, the dorms have been renovated or rebuilt to be much more luxurious, the school has built a number of incredibly opulent buildings, and there's just a whole lot more space and more wealth on display. The total enrollment went from somewhere around 8,000 then to about 10,000 today, so it's not that they're building these things to handle more students.
It seems that per-student spending has gone way up, and they're now providing a luxury education experience, not just a degree.
There are lifestyle expectations, either because the well off folks expect it, or those trying to gain a foothold believe that to be something that they have / will have earned.
Mediocre colleges will leave you on your own 99% of the time but if you're good enough to get into an Ivy or a similarly leveled school like Stanford or MIT it's very unlikely that cost will be the determining factor (not that it will be easy of course).
are there any meaningful ways to change the incentives to something other than raise as much money as possible to hire more administrative employees to raise as much money as possible?
(also if my premise is flawed and there are other things that contribute significantly to the burn of universities lmk)
A)They admit by strict gpa and SAT criteria. No essays needed! Got top scores, you are in!
B) they are cheap. For international, it's $32k Canadian tuition. This is almost roughly equivalent to in state tuition at U Michigan. For Quebecers, the tuition and fees are around $5k Canadian!
C) it's huge. 40k kids. And they are all the top kids. Canada builds big schools and just gets shit done.
The US system is just such BS. On our tour, the entire group was American, half of whom we're waiting on decisions from Ivy's which are released this week. It's crazy that the US is essentially inviting top students to leave the country for a great but much cheaper education.
>it's huge. 40k kids. And they are all the top kids. Canada builds big schools and just gets shit done
If you have a kid who wants more of a small school vibe I think that's also possible. I didn't go, but UToronto does residential colleges more like Oxbridge, I'd imagine that helps greatly w/ encouraging socializing.
Applications could NOT be easier. Send in transcript and SAT. Done. (And if you are well above the cutoffs from last year, KNOW you will be accepted. No drama.)
Additionally they don't require the SATs at although prior to COVID they also had a minimum score for that.
They will even admit in tranches at different times in the year. So if you are a top applicant you will find out earlier (early Jan) while those on the margin have to wait.
https://www.mcgill.ca/undergraduate-admissions/apply/require...
I come from a solidly upper middle class family and my brother is attending an Ivy for less than $10k out of pocket a year. This has really benefitted him as he can get a degree that he wants to without having to worry about the burdens of student loans. No other school he got into afforded him that opportunity- good state schools would have cost more.
There are a lot of caveats: we might be lucky to be in the exact income bracket for cheap tuition (although I do want to stress, the income bracket is fairly high), this financial aid could change at any point, the campus does feel excessive at times. But this opportunity has been the biggest positive influence on his life, and produced a well rounded man who was able to explore his interests . WAI from my perspective
...yet...
...parents still send their kids to college.
In other words - we are the problem, not the colleges.
Unless your kids want to be a doctor, lawyer, management consultant, or investment banker, then the influence college will have over your kid's career will be minimal. Nowadays, many trade skills pay more than what a college grad earns after graduation.
If you think cost of college is a problem, put your money where your mouth is and encourage your kids to do something different. I know I will.
https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculat...
According to this once you hit 300k or so family income you get nothing, even if your living in NYC.
So that's just 2 6 figure earners raising a family. 200k for a single person isn't rich. I can't imagine having an extra 80k per year as a family of 4 making 300k.
With that much money you could attend state school, save 60k a year and buy a house once you graduate ( down payment anyway).