I tend to wish this were true, because it would be better for the world even if neutral-to-negative for me. In truth, though: pedigree shouldn't matter, but it does.
Among the top 100 offerings or so, the differences in quality of education are very small. The differences in quality of students are pretty small. But connections matter, and even if Harvard student's aren't all shockingly brilliant, the dumb ones are connected.
If you go the #147 private college and pay $50k per year, you'd be better served by a state school. If you're talking about Harvard, though... no, it's not a waste of money.
Perhaps surprisingly, the influence of pedigree increases later in one's career. These numbers are estimates, but an MIT CS grad might make $100k out of college while the state-school grad makes $85k-- not a huge difference. Ten years out, those numbers look more like $250k and $150k. Why? Connections tend to get stronger with time, even when not formally kept up. So much of the business world is run by nostalgia. That's why prep school connections are more powerful than college, and college connections are more powerful than grad-school connections... even though the elite high schools are less selective and meritocratic. Old connections suggest predestination ("born to lead") and, because of that, have a cachet that new connections (though carrying more signal) don't. The future may be (and most hope it will be) rich and abundant but the past is a scarce and eternally limited commodity; there will never be more pedigree.
Where you went to school matters not at all, ten years out, if you're in the top or bottom 10%, relative to where you might be expected to go with your training, career-wise. If you do really well, no one cares where you went to school. Or if you make terrible choices and fail catastrophically, the Harvard degree just makes it more pathetic. For that middle 80%, those connections made early on are going to start throwing "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards and that's a major asset if you want to break the ceiling and become a player.
I'd say that it generally works like this. From 22-25, pedigree matters a lot in an evaluative sense. (Make that 22-29 if you get a PhD.) From 25-30, it doesn't matter all that much because people have more recent data, when it comes to evaluation. From 30-40, it starts to matter again, not because people judge you based on it-- your record speaks for itself-- but because you're vying for leadership or coveted creative/architectural roles and that means politics, and you need "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards (which come from having connections) for when your risks blow up. After 40, it seems to stop mattering because that's an age at which you shouldn't need "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards at all.
The examples you cite are highly selective elite universities where all the students are cream of the crop.
That's not what the article is about. It's about state schools versus private schools with presumably comparable admission rates and SAT scores. That's the choice 90% of students at state schools are making.
Some state schools, like UCB compete with elite private universities. If you want to make a comparison with MIT, you might want to ask if UCB grads make any less.
What a cute little story you've told. It sounds nice, but it just rings hollow with common experience. I consider myself a fairly social person, I went to one of the best Universities in the world. At least at this point, none of the people I still keep in touch with from my school (a fairly large group) would be helpful to my career in any way. I highly doubt they will be in the future. If, by some chance, in my 40s, a fellow alumni is helpful to my career by virtue of an arbitrary connection we have I would consider it remarkable, and a little bit of a personal failure.
I would never make a favorable business decision for the person sitting across the table from just because we happen to share an alma mater. If anything, I would be guarded against it being an issue.
I imagine the average person feels the same way that I do. I'm not saying there aren't politics as you make your way to a senior position, but don't count on any help to get there.
>Ten years out, those numbers look more like $250k and $150k.
If there are managers willing to pay an employee 40% more based on an education received a decade prior, there's a huge economic advantage to be had hiring those of "lower pedigree".
No one consciously cares, at that age, where people went to school. What happens is that the ones with pedigree are more likely to be selected for leadership positions early on, and appear "on merit" to be worth more, after several years of higher-quality work experience. In reality, they were just able to get themselves promoted faster. After ten years, though, they legitimately have a higher quality of work experience than those without the pedigree advantage.
So you wouldn't be necessarily able to save $100k by hiring people without the pedigree, because even though many are just as talented, they're not going to have the highest quality of work experience. There are plenty of people who'd do just fine, even with the lack of good experience, but you have to be able to find them.
I agree that you've basically nailed the dynamic in the career-development market, but I'll point out that there are a number of career resets you can use to escape it. Grad school. Founding a startup. Independent projects. Moving into a different field entirely.
These often aren't objectively worth it under the value system of your old career, but they essentially throw a monkey wrench into your career and make anyone reading it go "Huh? Why did they do that, and what does it mean for me and my company if I hire them?" And that, in turn, gives you an ability to reframe your story on your own terms. If you're behind in somebody else's value system, it makes no sense to continue molding your career to their value system. Instead, pick your value system and then seek out positions that play to your strengths.
Although it sounds reasonable, I'm not sure whether this way of contacts/pedigree is needed everywhere. For example in (continental) Europe people are treated more equally, probably because majority of good universities are public.
The public universities in the U.S. are quite good as well. It's not about quality of education.
When a society is expanding, pre-existing social class matters little, because the focus is on the future rather than the past. When it's stagnant or contracting, like Silicon Valley, you see the importance of pedigree start to grow rapidly.
So 11% of people who attended public universities are "thriving", and 4% of people who attended private universities are thriving. That means somewhere between 89 and 96 percent of people who attended university are not thriving. This paints a pretty dismal picture of the utility of a university degree for those who want to thrive, white middle class kids or otherwise.
This is a really shitty statistic and bad journalism.
> It asked graduates how they were doing across five different metrics, including financially, physically and socially. Eleven percent of graduates of public universities and private universities said they were "thriving" across all five. Twelve percent of graduates of U.S. News & World Report's top 100 schools were thriving, essentially the same as the rest.
It seems designed specifically to say negative things about the college experience. The article mentions three of five categories (does two extra words in a list really require that much more effort?). Relying on self-reporting of ambiguous self-determined "thriving" and making the strong implication that you have to think you're doing so across the board is just foolish.
> This is a really shitty statistic and bad journalism.
I think part of the explanation can be found at the end:
Max Ehrenfreund is a blogger
on the Financial desk
I'm not really sure what standards the Washington Post applies to "bloggers" as opposed to their more mainstream news articles. But IMO at some other sites (Forbes comes to mind) bloggers aren't held to very high standards at all.
The more elite the school, the more elite the ppl you meet. The financial outcomes can be easily explained solely on the networking effects of meeting ppl from more powerful sectors of society. No one sends their kids to an Ivy league school to get "Super smart", its to hang around the "right group" for later influence and networking with the "right people".
If you are going to send your kid to one of those, be sure to clearly explain to them that is the point, lest they fall into the trap of studying and getting good grades at the expense of networking.
(I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which parts of that are sarcastic, and how much. Frankly I'm not sure myself.)
Just make sure your kid studies just enough so the geeks don't think he's a completely good-for-nothing party bro. Because he's going to need to hire them as the developers for his next-big-thing startups. After all, every head-buried-in-the-sand developer needs a well-connected idea guy to part the clouds and let the sun shine through, right?
(I, too, leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which parts of that are sarcastic, and how much. Frankly I'm not sure myself.)
FWIW, in my experience, those goals weren't at all exclusive of each other. I went to one of those schools, studied hard, and did well. The CS program had a strong feeling of community, particularly among undergraduates who worked as TAs, and from that I developed a network of smart people (including people several years older and younger than me) who also studied hard and did well. There's no doubt I've benefited from that. But the network I'm talking about isn't a prototypical "old boys" network, and it wasn't developed by shmoozing at networking events. I feel very lucky for the opportunity to have the experience.
Pretty much every job I know of outside of our little SV tech bubble will reward you based on your college GPA. Unless something has changed in the last 8 years, a majority of my accounting/finance friends all were vetted on interviews and GPA when applying to E&Y, KPMG, Goldman and the like. Also, it's all about who you know. These type of people represent the majority of white-collar, white college graduate jobs out there - not tech.
Note - that being said, I've interviewed quite a few young graduates recently and for the life of me, I don't remember a single time I looked at someone's GPA. But that's because in tech I'm trying my best to hire young people based on merit. All that matters is whether you can ship code.
Exactly look at how many of the British political elite know each other through Oxbridge let alone the memners of the buller (think skull and bones but with much more dinking and bad bahavior).
I have a tough time with this article. I understand what it is trying to say. The costs are ridiculous. But what I see among my friends is that those who went to large public flagship schools got lost, and had a much tougher time. However, those who went to smaller private schools on scholarships built better connections with professors, and tended to do better long run.
It is no surprise that the students on scholarships are typically more successful in the long run. But the reason for the success is not only the college.
> It is no surprise that the students on scholarships are typically more successful in the long run. But the reason for the success is not only the college.
Private colleges give out scholarships like candy. It's a form of price discrimination.
Interesting. That's directly opposite what I've seen. My close high school friends nearly all went to Ivy League-quality schools: Yale, Penn, MIT, Caltech, etc. Some of us are happy. Most of us are succeeding. A few of us are excelling. (Personally, I'm struggling. I have this irrepressible notion that liberal arts are a waste of my time, no matter how hard I try to subscribe to the learning-for-learning's-sake theory, which is not great for grades.) We're all stressed out of our minds.
Three of my equally, if not more, intelligent friends ended up at public institutions or "second-" or "third-tier" schools. Unequivocally, they're happier. They're thriving, as the article puts it. Student council presidents, top of their class, balanced social life, good job or graduate school prospects.
Of course, this is all anecdata. Me as much as you. The article at least has some semblance of data.
In the end, it's an optimization problem. What is higher education optimizing for? Salary? That seems myopic. Happiness? That seems overly hedonistic. Maturity? Impact upon the world? Good luck measuring that.
College is only not worth it if you don't get out of it what you want. Most of us go to college because society tells us it leads to a "better life"--which is an inherently unquantifiable notion.
Interesting, in my experience, I've witnessed the opposite of what you've said. Most of my friends at private schools seem to be happier and tend to be more successful than those at mid tier state universities.
You can't assess anything until college is over and you are actually in the real world. Good Grades does not mean you will succeed in real life. It mostly means you are good at following orders.
That's why you have to evaluate the grade in the context of the course! GPA is meaningless; individual grades are much more informative. See Harry Lewis, recently appointed dean of Harvard's engineering school, on the subject. [0]
The savvy employers do this—though probably not enough. There's a finance firm that hires exclusively Math 55 [1] alumni—I forget the name; a number of tech firms screen for CS161 [2]. Both among the hardest classes you can find. An A in those takes a hell of a lot more than just following directions.
>It mostly means you are good at following orders.
Maybe if you went to a terrible school. In any decent school it means you were able to come up with a solution to a problem presented to you. This is especially true for upper-level classes where the majority of the grade is based on a personal project.
Nah, I sort of agree. I graduated with almost 4.0 for my masters. There's so much more I am learning now - things everyone who didn't do well in school learned - humility, balance of life and work, ability to adapt without explicit rules, implicit socialization and direction, ability to self direct, ability to group direct, ability to lead, ability to learn things not traditionally used as metrics of intelligence. Education gave me a beautiful foundation of knowledge, the concept and form of theory and knowledge, and a strong love for it. It didn't teach me how to live, nor could it teach me how to think outside the bounds it defines.
Solving discrete problems with discrete answers is just not the hard part of real life, at least not the entrepreneurial part which I am the most familiar with.
Starting and completing a huge project that doesn't have deadlines where you have to figure out how to bring it from idea to market is real, and it rarely takes a semester and it isn't at the discretion of a single person to look at it for 30 minutes and then put a letter grade on it, and then throw it in the garbage. The most important difference though is that amount of effort only loosely correlates with the success of a venture in the real world. In school you can really just brute force most problems.
> a "better life"--which is an inherently unquantifiable notion.
Spoken like a true liberal arts major.
A better life is pretty easily quantified. The part that gets you tied up in knots is deciding what "better" means. You stop a thousand people on the street, I guarantee you that a ridiculously overwhelming majority can give you an easily quantifiable answer to the question, "What is a better life?"
The answers won't be that hard to distill down to, "Enough hours spent doing these things." The numbers are there.
And no. College is not optimizing its graduates for a better life. College, since its inception, has assumed that you came in with one.
Heh, I'm a computer science major to my core. Spoken like a CS major at a liberal arts school, I suppose.
I suspect we agree. If you could universally define "better life," you could quantify it. But you can't. We're also bad--really bad--at analyzing ourselves. Right now, I'd love to be spending 60 hrs/week programming and less time writing papers. But I bet I'll feel differently in a decade.
> And no. College is not optimizing its graduates for a better life. College, since its inception, has assumed that you came in with one.
I'm not sure what you mean. Higher education has become increasingly accessible to the economically disadvantaged, not less.
Also, here's Harvard College's mission statement:
> Harvard College adheres to the purposes for which the Charter of 1650 was granted: “The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the … youth of this country….” In brief: Harvard strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities. To these ends, the College encourages students to respect ideas and their free expression, and to rejoice in discovery and in critical thought; to pursue excellence in a spirit of productive cooperation; and to assume responsibility for the consequences of personal actions. Harvard seeks to identify and to remove restraints on students’ full participation, so that individuals may explore their capabilities and interests and may develop their full intellectual and human potential. Education at Harvard should liberate students to explore, to create, to challenge, and to lead. The support the College provides to students is a foundation upon which self-reliance and habits of lifelong learning are built: Harvard expects that the scholarship and collegiality it fosters in its students will lead them in their later lives to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society.
That's pretty damn well summarized as "we empower our students to lead better lives." We can argue over whether college comes close to achieving that goal, but I'm comforted by the fact that the stated mission at least aligns with my personal reasons for attending school.
Tangential, but I wanted to respond to this part of your statement:
Right now, I'd love to be spending 60 hrs/week programming and less time writing papers. But I bet I'll feel differently in a decade.
I found that writing in college, for classes, was not fun. It was boring, there was a lot of "write about this thing" that I really didn't know all that well. Further the topics weren't something that interested me deeply. Even worse, on the rare occasions that I did get to choose really interesting topics, the situation was depressing, I just didn't know enough to be able to make a good argument, didn't have enough perspective to understand how to find the structure of the problem and argument, and didn't really nave the background to position my statements. It was an exercise in just noting what other sources said, and putting lots of footnotes - extremely dry crap.
However, 5-6 years after college, I found myself working with a research group at a university (as a staff support programmer), and I did get to spend all my time figuring things out, coding and generally doing cool stuff (basically your 60hrs/week programming). When the time came to make a final report on my first research project, and write up an academic paper about it, was annoyed at having to do another paper. It turned out that academic papers tend to have page counts too, and I'd need to be even more careful about footnoting ideas etc.
Something surprising happened with that though - the page count turned out to be a big problem, but in a completely unexpected way: I had to cut and rewrite several times, just to make solid statement and argument small enough to fit in 8 pages! Amazingly I had gone from "how do I fill 8 pages?" to "crap, I only have 8 pages to say this!".
I think the big difference was the depth of knowledge I had, combined with my genuine interest to describe work I found interesting and satisfying. The college writing course taught me how to footnote, how to present an argument, how to build a reasonable conclusion, but had missed the part about writing being fun when one knows the material well. I went on to also enjoy some other types of writing - grants (convincing someone you have a good idea and getting them to fund it) and position papers (aka white papers, on ideas that our group thought would be good directions for further research.
I'm mentioning this because even if you don't like the writing now, I'd suggest not letting it poison your future views of it - the experience can be rewarding under the right circumstances. Hopefully it will inspire you a bit to get through your current papers a bit easier :)
> Higher education has become increasingly accessible to the economically disadvantaged, not less.
The FAFSA is not a college-led program. Colleges have had to adapt to it and other grants and loans, but the accessibility is not at all what college has been optimizing for.
Indeed, the question of optimization you posed was not about accessibility, either. It was about outcome. Read up on the Occupy protests if you haven't heard about them; the one in Hong Kong only just dispersed.
"I have this irrepressible notion that liberal arts are a waste of my time"
I used to teach math at a large public university, and would always have kids asking 'what's the point of this' and thinking it was a waste of their time.
>(Personally, I'm struggling. I have this irrepressible notion that liberal arts are a waste of my time, no matter how hard I try to subscribe to the learning-for-learning's-sake theory, which is not great for grades.)
Think of it as learning the vocabulary you can use to communicate your STEMlord ideas to the peasants/mortals ;-).
>In the end, it's an optimization problem. What is higher education optimizing for? Salary? That seems myopic. Happiness? That seems overly hedonistic. Maturity? Impact upon the world? Good luck measuring that.
My experience is that top students can get an equivalent if not better education at large public universities. (I went to Duke and Michigan)
Public universities are much less forgiving, which means mediocre or unmotivated students get crushed in cases they would get hand-holding (and A- grades) at a private university.
As for connections, they're important and you get better ones at top schools, unequivocally, but you don't need them for many careers.
I went to a public school for CS. Noticed same. First and second years are full of "filter" courses. Calculus, Physics, and CS 101 weeded out whole swathes of students. Many large classes where you are mostly a faceless StudentID #. Many students switched majors, some schools, some droped out. It was brutal and this wasn't even a top tier school.
This is absolutely true. I went to Georgia Tech for undergrad, Northwestern for law school. After being given the run-around any time I wanted to do any little thing, I was floored by how much attention I got in the private institution. When my wife got pregnant her third year of school at Northwestern, with a delivery date during finals, our dean of students took care of everything to accommodate her. At Tech, she would've been shuffled from disinterested administrator to disinterested administrator for weeks.
This observation is mostly accurate - the less forgiving part is true, but grades can still be a bit of a crapshoot.
My own grades are highly erratic - I dominated in some of the hardest math classes where I went to undergrad (a public school), often being one of the top performers and easily the most knowledgeable, but did awful in other classes. I never cared that much about easy classes, and only applied myself on hard classes because they were mentally stimulating/challenged me. I also did not care about grades - I viewed my purpose at college to learn & develop, not be a 4.0 student.
When I went to grad school (a prestigious public school), I applied myself in all of my classes and did solid overall - all of my classes challenged me pretty hard, and so it motivated me to work hard.
I agree, but I'd add one thing. In addition to the mediocre and unmotivated students, there is a depressing number of motivated but somewhat unprepared students who get crushed as well. I really think a lot of these students would have thrived at a university that was more supportive.
I'm not advocating hand holding or coddling, but I do think that impacted majors at very strong public universities aren't really doing right by the talent level they enroll. They do society no favors by enrolling a student who didn't have a strong high school calculus curriculum, giving her a C her first semester, and then telling her that her GPA is too low for engineering now.
I think you're conflating the public/private divide with the college/university differences. I went to a public college, which avoids the issues inherent in enormous universities without the skyrocketing costs.
Everyone talks about the great network-effect from going to a good school. As someone who went to one of these supposedly great "network-effect-ey" schools I say it's bullshit.
As a thought experiment, think of your own college experience. Do you really keep in touch with that many people? Of the people you do keep in touch with, can any of them open opportunities for you that are at all relevant to your field?
People who go to Harvard, Ivies, Stanford, Berkley, et al, have the same basic "College-Experience"(TM) as everyone else. No one wants to admit it, but it's not the network-effect that helps. It's the branding!
Harvard, the Ivies, et al, have brand recognition, and brand recognition helps...a lot!
If you're hiring someone, don't you think that the person with a brand that you recognize is going to at least get that person a phone-screen or an expedited interview? You're desperate to hire someone and they went to Stanford, so they must be good, right?
Ivy league degrees are simply the best door-openers out of all the door openers you can get. Once you're in the door they're as useless as the other degrees are.
Door-opening is the biggest network effect, no? You climb the corporate ladder or close the deal [largely] based on your merit, but it's the network that gets you the job interview or investor pitch.
It's the friend who graduated two years ago at that consulting firm who puts in a good word for you after your interview; it's the final club grad council member who makes a few calls on your behalf; it's the other students in B school who are already successful venture capitalists and are actively looking for projects to fund.
I'll agree the branding is powerful. But, to be blunt, I'm skeptical that your lack of connections means that the network effect theory is bullshit.
I'd be curious to see the results of your thought experience on some other folks who went to "network-effect-ey" schools! I'm still mustering my way through higher education myself, but I feel like I've made some incredibly valuable connections.
I'm thinking on my own collect experience, and yes, the past few jobs I've had came because of friends I met in college, and I attended a public state university (back in the early 90s).
I got a job at IBM as a co-op during college. My third on-campus job was programming related due to a conversation I had with a masters student in Psychology (programming Myer-Briggs personality type tests plus some other more esoteric simulations); some other small programming jobs because of local companies posting on the bulletin board at college.
Once I got out of college, a friend and fellow school-mate hired me for the web-hosting company he started (which transformed three times). My current job is due to a another school-mate.
> Ivy league degrees are simply the best door-openers out of all the door openers you can get. Once you're in the door they're as useless as the other degrees are.
I present a counterpoint - I know someone who's a Stanford Law JD, and she's gotten quite a few doors opened (or opened wider) because of her degree. In fact, she wouldn't have made partner (smaller law firm) so fast without it.
Also many places like specific alumni because the founders or CxOs went there.
However, the skyrocketing cost of (private) higher education in general seems to reinforce your point - a 4-year degree simply isn't worth it for the Ivy-league if you factor in the price.
It depends on the person. I can't comment on Ivys, however I attended a very prestigious East coast prep school. At the time I was a terrible "networker" and I left there with zero long term friends and useful connections.
A good friend of mine went to a similar prep school, but he's more a naturally social guy, and he's maintained leverage connections with probably 100 people who have gone on to positions of power and prestige. He has been able to call on those acquaintances very successfully in his career to open doors and get introductions that simply aren't available to most people.
So just because I wasn't personally able to capitalize on the networking opportunity doesn't mean that the opportunity wasn't there.
I don't see how you got there. Being social is important yes, but you can't just meet the diverse number of people that its possible to in university: future lawyers, engineers, doctors, artists, bureaucrats etc. all in the same campus. College is the best time to make connections, and an Ivy League College is even better.
Well, I started with the fact that he said he isn't social and made few connections, while his sociable friend made many connections. From there, it wasn't hard to conclude that "college" had little to do with generating connections.
>but you can't just meet the diverse number of people that its possible to in university
Completely untrue.
First of all, you know where you can find diversity? Almost anywhere. Join a club or a team sport and you're likely to encounter people of all shapes, colours, ages and occupations.
Second, the University isn't as diverse as you proclaim. The average person you will meet in college in America or the Commonwealth will be globally wealthy, speak English and probably be a WASP, somewhere between ages 18 and 24. You surround yourself with like-minded people in your courses, many of whom will not graduate, and even fewer who will go on to careers related to their education.
Don't get me wrong; I love the college experience, and am a firm believer in education. I've already spent more time there than is optimal for my career.
>College is the best time to make connections
And what do you base this argument on? I didn't have a clue who I was at 20.
it's not that "college" would make a huge difference, it's that an Ivy league (or similar school) would allow a person like my friend to make connections that are helpful. The high-end prep school he went to means he has connections at global banks and financial firms, connections to families with 100s of millions of dollars of wealth, people in national level politics, international connections, etc... that wouldn't have been possible at a normal high school.
You'll make connections, but to who? Consider Peter Thiel. He doesn't come from crazy money (his dad was a chemical engineer). But he went to Stanford for undergrad and law school, which allowed him to get a job on Wall Street. He funded his first hedge fund by raising $1 million from family and friends.
Very few people from middle class families who go to state schools can raise $1 million for a business venture from family and friends in their 30's, no matter how social they were in college. However, it's very doable if you go to an Ivy where half your class ends up at investment banks and hedge funds, where they're making six figure bonuses just a few years out. It's even more doable if you first do a stint in one of those jobs--you gain instant credibility as someone who can be trusted with that kind of money.
I guess as a anecdotal counterpoint, I didn't go to the Ivy leagues but I did get my first job because a sales guy recognized my college and had a friend who happened to live next door to me in the dorms and whose computer I had helped fix at some point.
Not a fan of this way of thinking about university, as though it's some power-up in the competition to make the most money. It's all very American. What about learning and being in an environment that inspires you?
Learning and being in an environment that inspires you is great, but has nothing to do with the vast majority of people's college experience. For most people, it's just a job credentialing service.
Going to college/university with the primary motivation of getting a job/career in some field seems like the more pragmatic attitude[1]. Going to college/university solely in order to learn and broaden your horizons seems like an upper class mentality. Which is fine, if you actually are upper class or have the equivalent funds. If you don't, it might be less than ideal.
[1] Of course this can be taken to its extreme, i.e. greed and overt status seeking.
I agree but the cost in the US has gone so crazy that even the biggest believers in its inherent value (myself included) end up having questions about comparative worth.
> What about learning and being in an environment that inspires you?
Why do you need to go to college for that? Especially in the internet age, there's all kinds of awesome learning resources to consume and projects to join.
Want to build a solar car? Form a club, publicize on meetup.com, and do it. Or form a business and figure out how to get paid to do it.
1) Network generation is weak, but still there. Does it justify 150k + 150k opportunity cost? The data says no.
2) Colleges are, however, great at identity generation. People who come from top tier schools feel and act like they are awesome. This dramatically helps when it comes to asking for a higher salary, better position, etc. I have met a number of people who didn't go to college, and a lot of them feel they need to prove that they are just as smart as college alums (which they are).
3) Colleges shouldn't be viewed as an economic investment. It is also an intellectual investment. It helps change your world view into something larger and more interesting. I benefited dramatically from reading Plato under the tutelage of Ancient Greek scholars.
4) Lastly, colleges are FUN. Colleges are filled with parties and friends. You have to include this in the costs.
Most of that. But some of us didn't enjoy parties. Still, the friends I made (20 years ago) are still friends so that part is definitely true.
On the other hand, if I had been digging ditches maybe I would have met and kept friends in the dirt business. Not as lucrative maybe; but the lifelong friend part would still be true. So its maybe not 'college' that yields 'friends' but rather 'being young and in some group'
That's part of the problem. There's no "hold the fun" option if you're price sensitive or if you want to invest your fun budget in something else.
This is a really important point because it's really an age and lifestyle discrimination. If you're in your forties and want to get a degree (or a different one), you're still funding late night movies on the quad and disc golf even if you need to be home with the kids.
That being said, I'm sure the fun line items aren't the bulk of education expenses, but other frivolous things certainly are: new rec centers, impressive fountains, micromanaging administrators, etc.
I'm about 20 years in on my career and can maybe provide a few observations:
- Outside of very few jobs, this article is absolutely correct. The few jobs that it really matters are ones where they won't even look at your resume unless is has "Harvard" under "Education" on the resume for no set of reasons that have anything to do with the quality of the education. I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to if they really want to work in those kinds of places -- note: the burn-out rate on those places is usually around 2 years, then you're out in the market with the plebs and a pretentious work history you'll have to explain away for the rest of your life.
- Very early in your career, maybe the first 2-3 years, if you went to a top-tier private school you might receive a slight pay or position stats buff over your state schooled peers. If you went to a private school that wasn't top-tier nobody will recognize it and it'll be a waste of your money. Rule of thumb, if the private school you fight your way to get into and pay out the nose to attend isn't immediately name recognizable, nobody will care in the slightest early in your career and it may as well have been the local commuter school later on.
- This stats buff goes away very fast and hard as your movement up the corporate ladder start to be based on factors other than the school you went to. After your initial 2-3 years, you'll be expected to have learned the job and be able to perform at the working level. I've observed that there is almost no correlation between the best performers and the school they went to. If anything there might be a slight bias towards those that went to impersonal state schools since they're used to not having their hand held. This is the hard lesson that places like Google are learning. One of the difficult things with being data driven is that when the data shows your state school grads do as well or better than your top-tier grads in the workplace, you have to pay attention. And the data has shown conclusively that it really doesn't matter.
- By 10 years in, employers look for degree level (M.S. over B.S.) and possible field (relevant like Computer Science vs. irrelevant like Anthropology) and completely don't care what school you went to in the slightest. Those that do, 10 years in on a career, are usually places you don't want to work long-term.
- By 20 years in, you could have gone to the worst cow-poke state school in the country and nobody will care even in the slightest and your peers at that level will have educations from an impossibly diverse collection of schools.
- Many of my peers who graduated from a top-tier/private school realize that they'll need to return for an M.A./M.S. or an M.B.A. at some point in their career to maintain upward momentum. Since they're working at the same time this inevitably means going to the local state school. A comment I've heard over and over again is that state schools often don't do as much hand holding and advising (degree counseling) as the privates and they often feel lost in the impersonal grind. Many of them drop out a year in because of this. If you end up here, don't drop out, it's not that hard, but state schools won't treat you like a special snowflake.
- However, you can go to the wrong school. The big commercial for profit schools, like University of Phoenix or similar, can be a slight drag on your early career post-school and make it harder to hit career maximums. Companies like to fill up the "Leadership" page on their web site with people who went to well credentialed schools: state and private doesn't make a difference, exploitive for-profit does.
- All of my peers with huge student debts went to private schools. 20 years in, I have peers still paying $200-500/mo to service their loans. That's a car payment. The people who are debt free, and get to take on expensive hobb...
Variations between degree programs is bigger than variations between schools. It matters more what you major in vs what school you went to. For example, pretty much any CS degree from any school can get you a job. Whereas, even a degree from a selective school in say, Psychology or Business Admin will be hard for anyone.
Edit: I work in an education tech company and read a decent amount of literature on the subject of school selection and outcomes.
"The biggest predictor of whether a graduate wasn't thriving was whether he or she had student loans. Fourteen percent of those without any debt said they were thriving, compared to 2 percent of those with more than $40,000 of debt. You can't draw iron-clad conclusions from that..."
Maybe "you" can't draw any iron-clad conclusions from that observation, but I can. Debt is a multiplier. It's great when there's appreciation (ex: buying a house) but a heavy burden when there's no upside (credit cards, student loans) and an impossible crushing weight if there is depreciation (ex: buying a house that drops 20% in value).
To all current and future students: good luck out there. Learning for learning's sake is fine. But don't forget to focus on outcomes, too.
Student loan debt can be a multiplier if it increases your income. I started my CS degree at 27, working at a pizza restaurant manager. 4 years later (and 2 years into my new career) I am making twice what was then. My loans will be paid off in 10 years and will still have my career and will continue to out earn what I would have in my old life.
While this clearly isn't the case for all degree earners, it certainly has upside in a lot of cases.
I only skimmed the article after the first couple of paragraphs. The whole $42,000 price tag for a private college is quite a misnomer. My sister went to Michigan Tech, I went to a private liberal arts college. After four years, she has more debt then me.
Your public institution is about as stingy as it can come with it's funding. That $18,000 price tag is going to end up being your final price. If you are a good student, that private college will throw scholarships at you hand over fist. My college's price (starting at $26,000/yr) would typically get slashed by 50% at the start of each year just by the dividends off the school's endowment -- which it does not figure in to it's advertised costs since it various drastically from fiscal year to fiscal year. After that, load on a bunch of random scholarships and I would be down to around $9,000/yr. I had a couple friends whose parents took jobs at the college to get their kids a 90% discount on tuition. They actually ended up making money going to college.
I think that latter statement is very unfair. Myself, any many other "good students" I know still faced ~100-200k in expenses (both tuition and otherwise) at the end of 4 years. Even being offered essentially a 'half off' masters did little to lessen the overall impact; and that was all I got. Granted, I was well enough off financially to recover from this, but other close friends in less advantageous positions came out with 50k+ in debt, and they had "significant amounts" of assistance.
I found my university at least to be just as stingy as the public universities you speak of.
My apologies in advance for being pedantic on the web but I think there is a chance a HackerNews reader would appreciate this: "Misnomer" means something is improperly named. It doesn't mean merely misleading.
I remember back in my undergrad, "tuition" was approximately 1/4 of what students actually had to pay. The rest was "fees". Strangely enough, tuition wasn't allowed to rise faster than inflation, but our "fees" got larger and multiplied each year.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadAmong the top 100 offerings or so, the differences in quality of education are very small. The differences in quality of students are pretty small. But connections matter, and even if Harvard student's aren't all shockingly brilliant, the dumb ones are connected.
If you go the #147 private college and pay $50k per year, you'd be better served by a state school. If you're talking about Harvard, though... no, it's not a waste of money.
Perhaps surprisingly, the influence of pedigree increases later in one's career. These numbers are estimates, but an MIT CS grad might make $100k out of college while the state-school grad makes $85k-- not a huge difference. Ten years out, those numbers look more like $250k and $150k. Why? Connections tend to get stronger with time, even when not formally kept up. So much of the business world is run by nostalgia. That's why prep school connections are more powerful than college, and college connections are more powerful than grad-school connections... even though the elite high schools are less selective and meritocratic. Old connections suggest predestination ("born to lead") and, because of that, have a cachet that new connections (though carrying more signal) don't. The future may be (and most hope it will be) rich and abundant but the past is a scarce and eternally limited commodity; there will never be more pedigree.
Where you went to school matters not at all, ten years out, if you're in the top or bottom 10%, relative to where you might be expected to go with your training, career-wise. If you do really well, no one cares where you went to school. Or if you make terrible choices and fail catastrophically, the Harvard degree just makes it more pathetic. For that middle 80%, those connections made early on are going to start throwing "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards and that's a major asset if you want to break the ceiling and become a player.
I'd say that it generally works like this. From 22-25, pedigree matters a lot in an evaluative sense. (Make that 22-29 if you get a PhD.) From 25-30, it doesn't matter all that much because people have more recent data, when it comes to evaluation. From 30-40, it starts to matter again, not because people judge you based on it-- your record speaks for itself-- but because you're vying for leadership or coveted creative/architectural roles and that means politics, and you need "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards (which come from having connections) for when your risks blow up. After 40, it seems to stop mattering because that's an age at which you shouldn't need "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards at all.
That's not what the article is about. It's about state schools versus private schools with presumably comparable admission rates and SAT scores. That's the choice 90% of students at state schools are making.
Some state schools, like UCB compete with elite private universities. If you want to make a comparison with MIT, you might want to ask if UCB grads make any less.
I would never make a favorable business decision for the person sitting across the table from just because we happen to share an alma mater. If anything, I would be guarded against it being an issue.
I imagine the average person feels the same way that I do. I'm not saying there aren't politics as you make your way to a senior position, but don't count on any help to get there.
If there are managers willing to pay an employee 40% more based on an education received a decade prior, there's a huge economic advantage to be had hiring those of "lower pedigree".
So you wouldn't be necessarily able to save $100k by hiring people without the pedigree, because even though many are just as talented, they're not going to have the highest quality of work experience. There are plenty of people who'd do just fine, even with the lack of good experience, but you have to be able to find them.
These often aren't objectively worth it under the value system of your old career, but they essentially throw a monkey wrench into your career and make anyone reading it go "Huh? Why did they do that, and what does it mean for me and my company if I hire them?" And that, in turn, gives you an ability to reframe your story on your own terms. If you're behind in somebody else's value system, it makes no sense to continue molding your career to their value system. Instead, pick your value system and then seek out positions that play to your strengths.
When a society is expanding, pre-existing social class matters little, because the focus is on the future rather than the past. When it's stagnant or contracting, like Silicon Valley, you see the importance of pedigree start to grow rapidly.
> It asked graduates how they were doing across five different metrics, including financially, physically and socially. Eleven percent of graduates of public universities and private universities said they were "thriving" across all five. Twelve percent of graduates of U.S. News & World Report's top 100 schools were thriving, essentially the same as the rest.
It seems designed specifically to say negative things about the college experience. The article mentions three of five categories (does two extra words in a list really require that much more effort?). Relying on self-reporting of ambiguous self-determined "thriving" and making the strong implication that you have to think you're doing so across the board is just foolish.
I think part of the explanation can be found at the end:
I'm not really sure what standards the Washington Post applies to "bloggers" as opposed to their more mainstream news articles. But IMO at some other sites (Forbes comes to mind) bloggers aren't held to very high standards at all.(I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which parts of that are sarcastic, and how much. Frankly I'm not sure myself.)
(I, too, leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which parts of that are sarcastic, and how much. Frankly I'm not sure myself.)
"Kid, nobody cares how smart you are. Just smile and nod and you'll go further than you can imagine."
Note - that being said, I've interviewed quite a few young graduates recently and for the life of me, I don't remember a single time I looked at someone's GPA. But that's because in tech I'm trying my best to hire young people based on merit. All that matters is whether you can ship code.
Private colleges give out scholarships like candy. It's a form of price discrimination.
Three of my equally, if not more, intelligent friends ended up at public institutions or "second-" or "third-tier" schools. Unequivocally, they're happier. They're thriving, as the article puts it. Student council presidents, top of their class, balanced social life, good job or graduate school prospects.
Of course, this is all anecdata. Me as much as you. The article at least has some semblance of data.
In the end, it's an optimization problem. What is higher education optimizing for? Salary? That seems myopic. Happiness? That seems overly hedonistic. Maturity? Impact upon the world? Good luck measuring that.
College is only not worth it if you don't get out of it what you want. Most of us go to college because society tells us it leads to a "better life"--which is an inherently unquantifiable notion.
The savvy employers do this—though probably not enough. There's a finance firm that hires exclusively Math 55 [1] alumni—I forget the name; a number of tech firms screen for CS161 [2]. Both among the hardest classes you can find. An A in those takes a hell of a lot more than just following directions.
[0]: http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2014/11/can-we-find-better-w... [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55 [2]: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/cs161/
Maybe if you went to a terrible school. In any decent school it means you were able to come up with a solution to a problem presented to you. This is especially true for upper-level classes where the majority of the grade is based on a personal project.
Starting and completing a huge project that doesn't have deadlines where you have to figure out how to bring it from idea to market is real, and it rarely takes a semester and it isn't at the discretion of a single person to look at it for 30 minutes and then put a letter grade on it, and then throw it in the garbage. The most important difference though is that amount of effort only loosely correlates with the success of a venture in the real world. In school you can really just brute force most problems.
Spoken like a true liberal arts major.
A better life is pretty easily quantified. The part that gets you tied up in knots is deciding what "better" means. You stop a thousand people on the street, I guarantee you that a ridiculously overwhelming majority can give you an easily quantifiable answer to the question, "What is a better life?"
The answers won't be that hard to distill down to, "Enough hours spent doing these things." The numbers are there.
And no. College is not optimizing its graduates for a better life. College, since its inception, has assumed that you came in with one.
I suspect we agree. If you could universally define "better life," you could quantify it. But you can't. We're also bad--really bad--at analyzing ourselves. Right now, I'd love to be spending 60 hrs/week programming and less time writing papers. But I bet I'll feel differently in a decade.
> And no. College is not optimizing its graduates for a better life. College, since its inception, has assumed that you came in with one.
I'm not sure what you mean. Higher education has become increasingly accessible to the economically disadvantaged, not less.
Also, here's Harvard College's mission statement:
> Harvard College adheres to the purposes for which the Charter of 1650 was granted: “The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the … youth of this country….” In brief: Harvard strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities. To these ends, the College encourages students to respect ideas and their free expression, and to rejoice in discovery and in critical thought; to pursue excellence in a spirit of productive cooperation; and to assume responsibility for the consequences of personal actions. Harvard seeks to identify and to remove restraints on students’ full participation, so that individuals may explore their capabilities and interests and may develop their full intellectual and human potential. Education at Harvard should liberate students to explore, to create, to challenge, and to lead. The support the College provides to students is a foundation upon which self-reliance and habits of lifelong learning are built: Harvard expects that the scholarship and collegiality it fosters in its students will lead them in their later lives to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society.
That's pretty damn well summarized as "we empower our students to lead better lives." We can argue over whether college comes close to achieving that goal, but I'm comforted by the fact that the stated mission at least aligns with my personal reasons for attending school.
Right now, I'd love to be spending 60 hrs/week programming and less time writing papers. But I bet I'll feel differently in a decade.
I found that writing in college, for classes, was not fun. It was boring, there was a lot of "write about this thing" that I really didn't know all that well. Further the topics weren't something that interested me deeply. Even worse, on the rare occasions that I did get to choose really interesting topics, the situation was depressing, I just didn't know enough to be able to make a good argument, didn't have enough perspective to understand how to find the structure of the problem and argument, and didn't really nave the background to position my statements. It was an exercise in just noting what other sources said, and putting lots of footnotes - extremely dry crap.
However, 5-6 years after college, I found myself working with a research group at a university (as a staff support programmer), and I did get to spend all my time figuring things out, coding and generally doing cool stuff (basically your 60hrs/week programming). When the time came to make a final report on my first research project, and write up an academic paper about it, was annoyed at having to do another paper. It turned out that academic papers tend to have page counts too, and I'd need to be even more careful about footnoting ideas etc.
Something surprising happened with that though - the page count turned out to be a big problem, but in a completely unexpected way: I had to cut and rewrite several times, just to make solid statement and argument small enough to fit in 8 pages! Amazingly I had gone from "how do I fill 8 pages?" to "crap, I only have 8 pages to say this!".
I think the big difference was the depth of knowledge I had, combined with my genuine interest to describe work I found interesting and satisfying. The college writing course taught me how to footnote, how to present an argument, how to build a reasonable conclusion, but had missed the part about writing being fun when one knows the material well. I went on to also enjoy some other types of writing - grants (convincing someone you have a good idea and getting them to fund it) and position papers (aka white papers, on ideas that our group thought would be good directions for further research.
I'm mentioning this because even if you don't like the writing now, I'd suggest not letting it poison your future views of it - the experience can be rewarding under the right circumstances. Hopefully it will inspire you a bit to get through your current papers a bit easier :)
The FAFSA is not a college-led program. Colleges have had to adapt to it and other grants and loans, but the accessibility is not at all what college has been optimizing for.
Indeed, the question of optimization you posed was not about accessibility, either. It was about outcome. Read up on the Occupy protests if you haven't heard about them; the one in Hong Kong only just dispersed.
I used to teach math at a large public university, and would always have kids asking 'what's the point of this' and thinking it was a waste of their time.
Think of it as learning the vocabulary you can use to communicate your STEMlord ideas to the peasants/mortals ;-).
>In the end, it's an optimization problem. What is higher education optimizing for? Salary? That seems myopic. Happiness? That seems overly hedonistic. Maturity? Impact upon the world? Good luck measuring that.
The graduate's optimization power.
Public universities are much less forgiving, which means mediocre or unmotivated students get crushed in cases they would get hand-holding (and A- grades) at a private university.
As for connections, they're important and you get better ones at top schools, unequivocally, but you don't need them for many careers.
I went to a public school for CS. Noticed same. First and second years are full of "filter" courses. Calculus, Physics, and CS 101 weeded out whole swathes of students. Many large classes where you are mostly a faceless StudentID #. Many students switched majors, some schools, some droped out. It was brutal and this wasn't even a top tier school.
After that it was a lot better.
My own grades are highly erratic - I dominated in some of the hardest math classes where I went to undergrad (a public school), often being one of the top performers and easily the most knowledgeable, but did awful in other classes. I never cared that much about easy classes, and only applied myself on hard classes because they were mentally stimulating/challenged me. I also did not care about grades - I viewed my purpose at college to learn & develop, not be a 4.0 student.
When I went to grad school (a prestigious public school), I applied myself in all of my classes and did solid overall - all of my classes challenged me pretty hard, and so it motivated me to work hard.
I'm not advocating hand holding or coddling, but I do think that impacted majors at very strong public universities aren't really doing right by the talent level they enroll. They do society no favors by enrolling a student who didn't have a strong high school calculus curriculum, giving her a C her first semester, and then telling her that her GPA is too low for engineering now.
As a thought experiment, think of your own college experience. Do you really keep in touch with that many people? Of the people you do keep in touch with, can any of them open opportunities for you that are at all relevant to your field?
People who go to Harvard, Ivies, Stanford, Berkley, et al, have the same basic "College-Experience"(TM) as everyone else. No one wants to admit it, but it's not the network-effect that helps. It's the branding!
Harvard, the Ivies, et al, have brand recognition, and brand recognition helps...a lot!
If you're hiring someone, don't you think that the person with a brand that you recognize is going to at least get that person a phone-screen or an expedited interview? You're desperate to hire someone and they went to Stanford, so they must be good, right?
Ivy league degrees are simply the best door-openers out of all the door openers you can get. Once you're in the door they're as useless as the other degrees are.
It's the friend who graduated two years ago at that consulting firm who puts in a good word for you after your interview; it's the final club grad council member who makes a few calls on your behalf; it's the other students in B school who are already successful venture capitalists and are actively looking for projects to fund.
I'll agree the branding is powerful. But, to be blunt, I'm skeptical that your lack of connections means that the network effect theory is bullshit.
I'd be curious to see the results of your thought experience on some other folks who went to "network-effect-ey" schools! I'm still mustering my way through higher education myself, but I feel like I've made some incredibly valuable connections.
I got a job at IBM as a co-op during college. My third on-campus job was programming related due to a conversation I had with a masters student in Psychology (programming Myer-Briggs personality type tests plus some other more esoteric simulations); some other small programming jobs because of local companies posting on the bulletin board at college.
Once I got out of college, a friend and fellow school-mate hired me for the web-hosting company he started (which transformed three times). My current job is due to a another school-mate.
I present a counterpoint - I know someone who's a Stanford Law JD, and she's gotten quite a few doors opened (or opened wider) because of her degree. In fact, she wouldn't have made partner (smaller law firm) so fast without it.
Also many places like specific alumni because the founders or CxOs went there.
However, the skyrocketing cost of (private) higher education in general seems to reinforce your point - a 4-year degree simply isn't worth it for the Ivy-league if you factor in the price.
Knowing someone is.
A good friend of mine went to a similar prep school, but he's more a naturally social guy, and he's maintained leverage connections with probably 100 people who have gone on to positions of power and prestige. He has been able to call on those acquaintances very successfully in his career to open doors and get introductions that simply aren't available to most people.
So just because I wasn't personally able to capitalize on the networking opportunity doesn't mean that the opportunity wasn't there.
It sounds to me that you reinforce the OPs argument: social people will make connections regardless.
Well, I started with the fact that he said he isn't social and made few connections, while his sociable friend made many connections. From there, it wasn't hard to conclude that "college" had little to do with generating connections.
>but you can't just meet the diverse number of people that its possible to in university
Completely untrue.
First of all, you know where you can find diversity? Almost anywhere. Join a club or a team sport and you're likely to encounter people of all shapes, colours, ages and occupations.
Second, the University isn't as diverse as you proclaim. The average person you will meet in college in America or the Commonwealth will be globally wealthy, speak English and probably be a WASP, somewhere between ages 18 and 24. You surround yourself with like-minded people in your courses, many of whom will not graduate, and even fewer who will go on to careers related to their education.
Don't get me wrong; I love the college experience, and am a firm believer in education. I've already spent more time there than is optimal for my career.
>College is the best time to make connections
And what do you base this argument on? I didn't have a clue who I was at 20.
Very few people from middle class families who go to state schools can raise $1 million for a business venture from family and friends in their 30's, no matter how social they were in college. However, it's very doable if you go to an Ivy where half your class ends up at investment banks and hedge funds, where they're making six figure bonuses just a few years out. It's even more doable if you first do a stint in one of those jobs--you gain instant credibility as someone who can be trusted with that kind of money.
[1] Of course this can be taken to its extreme, i.e. greed and overt status seeking.
Why do you need to go to college for that? Especially in the internet age, there's all kinds of awesome learning resources to consume and projects to join.
Want to build a solar car? Form a club, publicize on meetup.com, and do it. Or form a business and figure out how to get paid to do it.
2) Colleges are, however, great at identity generation. People who come from top tier schools feel and act like they are awesome. This dramatically helps when it comes to asking for a higher salary, better position, etc. I have met a number of people who didn't go to college, and a lot of them feel they need to prove that they are just as smart as college alums (which they are).
3) Colleges shouldn't be viewed as an economic investment. It is also an intellectual investment. It helps change your world view into something larger and more interesting. I benefited dramatically from reading Plato under the tutelage of Ancient Greek scholars.
4) Lastly, colleges are FUN. Colleges are filled with parties and friends. You have to include this in the costs.
On the other hand, if I had been digging ditches maybe I would have met and kept friends in the dirt business. Not as lucrative maybe; but the lifelong friend part would still be true. So its maybe not 'college' that yields 'friends' but rather 'being young and in some group'
That's part of the problem. There's no "hold the fun" option if you're price sensitive or if you want to invest your fun budget in something else.
This is a really important point because it's really an age and lifestyle discrimination. If you're in your forties and want to get a degree (or a different one), you're still funding late night movies on the quad and disc golf even if you need to be home with the kids.
That being said, I'm sure the fun line items aren't the bulk of education expenses, but other frivolous things certainly are: new rec centers, impressive fountains, micromanaging administrators, etc.
- Outside of very few jobs, this article is absolutely correct. The few jobs that it really matters are ones where they won't even look at your resume unless is has "Harvard" under "Education" on the resume for no set of reasons that have anything to do with the quality of the education. I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to if they really want to work in those kinds of places -- note: the burn-out rate on those places is usually around 2 years, then you're out in the market with the plebs and a pretentious work history you'll have to explain away for the rest of your life.
- Very early in your career, maybe the first 2-3 years, if you went to a top-tier private school you might receive a slight pay or position stats buff over your state schooled peers. If you went to a private school that wasn't top-tier nobody will recognize it and it'll be a waste of your money. Rule of thumb, if the private school you fight your way to get into and pay out the nose to attend isn't immediately name recognizable, nobody will care in the slightest early in your career and it may as well have been the local commuter school later on.
- This stats buff goes away very fast and hard as your movement up the corporate ladder start to be based on factors other than the school you went to. After your initial 2-3 years, you'll be expected to have learned the job and be able to perform at the working level. I've observed that there is almost no correlation between the best performers and the school they went to. If anything there might be a slight bias towards those that went to impersonal state schools since they're used to not having their hand held. This is the hard lesson that places like Google are learning. One of the difficult things with being data driven is that when the data shows your state school grads do as well or better than your top-tier grads in the workplace, you have to pay attention. And the data has shown conclusively that it really doesn't matter.
- By 10 years in, employers look for degree level (M.S. over B.S.) and possible field (relevant like Computer Science vs. irrelevant like Anthropology) and completely don't care what school you went to in the slightest. Those that do, 10 years in on a career, are usually places you don't want to work long-term.
- By 20 years in, you could have gone to the worst cow-poke state school in the country and nobody will care even in the slightest and your peers at that level will have educations from an impossibly diverse collection of schools.
- Many of my peers who graduated from a top-tier/private school realize that they'll need to return for an M.A./M.S. or an M.B.A. at some point in their career to maintain upward momentum. Since they're working at the same time this inevitably means going to the local state school. A comment I've heard over and over again is that state schools often don't do as much hand holding and advising (degree counseling) as the privates and they often feel lost in the impersonal grind. Many of them drop out a year in because of this. If you end up here, don't drop out, it's not that hard, but state schools won't treat you like a special snowflake.
- However, you can go to the wrong school. The big commercial for profit schools, like University of Phoenix or similar, can be a slight drag on your early career post-school and make it harder to hit career maximums. Companies like to fill up the "Leadership" page on their web site with people who went to well credentialed schools: state and private doesn't make a difference, exploitive for-profit does.
- All of my peers with huge student debts went to private schools. 20 years in, I have peers still paying $200-500/mo to service their loans. That's a car payment. The people who are debt free, and get to take on expensive hobb...
[1]http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/private-school-no-go...
Edit: I work in an education tech company and read a decent amount of literature on the subject of school selection and outcomes.
Maybe "you" can't draw any iron-clad conclusions from that observation, but I can. Debt is a multiplier. It's great when there's appreciation (ex: buying a house) but a heavy burden when there's no upside (credit cards, student loans) and an impossible crushing weight if there is depreciation (ex: buying a house that drops 20% in value).
To all current and future students: good luck out there. Learning for learning's sake is fine. But don't forget to focus on outcomes, too.
While this clearly isn't the case for all degree earners, it certainly has upside in a lot of cases.
Your public institution is about as stingy as it can come with it's funding. That $18,000 price tag is going to end up being your final price. If you are a good student, that private college will throw scholarships at you hand over fist. My college's price (starting at $26,000/yr) would typically get slashed by 50% at the start of each year just by the dividends off the school's endowment -- which it does not figure in to it's advertised costs since it various drastically from fiscal year to fiscal year. After that, load on a bunch of random scholarships and I would be down to around $9,000/yr. I had a couple friends whose parents took jobs at the college to get their kids a 90% discount on tuition. They actually ended up making money going to college.
I found my university at least to be just as stingy as the public universities you speak of.
"In an email to NPR, a Berkeley spokeswoman said about 40 percent of undergrads there don't pay any tuition at all."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/11/24/366370724/cal...
How about at Berkeley?
http://registrar.berkeley.edu/feesched.html
looking at this, it isn't too bad at berkeley.