Is Elite College Worth It? Maybe Not
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You can absolutely find motivated peers and professors at state schools, particularly if you look at places like the honors college. If you want to land a good job, go to a good grad school, etc (which is the goal for most people), all of that is 100% possible from a state school.
However, if you want to do something non-traditional (startups, research abroad, "choose your own adventure" style careers), I found that the "elite" school offered a lot more opportunity. Part of that is due to funding/size, where top schools have more money to allocate to students who ask for it. Students at elite schools have more support on average (from family as well as the school itself), so they tend to have more opportunities open, earlier.
It's like the difference between a big city and a small town. Plenty of people are successful without living in a huge city, so it's definitely possible. You could argue that the average drive of folks in a big city is higher, but a lot of that has to do with resources and opportunities as well.
The top students at a good state school would absolutely fit in at an elite school. The only difference I saw was in the support/resources they had before coming to college.
I'd add scientific research experience. I had a professor who I worked for and gave me research experience. I was meeting with him 1-1 as if I was a graduate student of his at my top-25 undergraduate university. I also got a publication out of it. This gave me a huge leg up in my graduate applications for PhD, and it helped me determine that was something I was interested in to start with.
That sort of very personal relationship is much harder to find at the big state schools.
That being said, I was fortunate enough to have similar experiences re: research at the state school as well (a professor who went out of his way to mentor me, leading to a few publications). It was definitely harder to find (because of how many other students professors at big state schools have to deal with), but it was more a function of professors' time than their willingness.
Then the question is, did the startup founders get successful thanks to their status (which also helped them get to "elite" schools) or was it thanks to the school.
Trading your conjecture for a bit of anecdata here: this has not been my experience. The most interesting (and kindest!) person I ever met went to Harvard after placing in their national speech and debate tournament.
I don't think any meaningful conclusion about the personalities of elite college attendees could be drawn from standardized tests and extracurriculars.
But yeah, other than him, all the top guys were from elite American universities. All smart, hard working, and deeply interesting in a way that you really don't see very often these days.
The people who took on community service hours because it helped them understand the less fortunate and taught them skills and the value of hard work will succeed. The people who took on community service hours because they were a requirement on a resume will not. (Of course, for some definition of success - most of both groups will likely be successful at life, but I'll bet that the median, mean, and mode happiness for the latter group are higher)
Similarly with standardized testing - I was very into studying for standardized testing because my parents put it into my blood that this is what I ought to do. So I took the tests, got perfect scores, got into an elite school. But I also learned a ton of math and science as a result of that study.
So, while it's true that getting into an elite school means playing a certain game, the game is not entirely without value.
I guess, colleges want people who could have learned those lessons. Exposure is a requirement. Unfortunately, they've not been really good at telling whether the lessons are learned.
The real issue with these modern elite school graduates is that either they are massively indebted or that they come from an increasingly insulated wealthy class, not that they are dull.
This issue actually can't be overstated. It's a real problem not only with elite schools, but even with a lot of non-elite graduates as well.
Not sure what a good solution for that is though?
When I compare my skill-set and knowledge-set now to 12 years ago, when I was 18, I am remarkably astounded by the huge amount of $$ I casually dropped on an elite education. Even with $20k paid by merit scholarships and research grants, I was dropping $40k yearly for an education that was maybe 10-15% better than what I could've gotten for $5k yearly at a local school. If I took that $35k yearly and invested it into the stock market, I'd probably be about $200k richer today. Is that 10% of a difference really worth $200k to me now? Is a slightly deeper/broader knowledge better than half a home, in my MCOL area? Is it better than a Tesla and a yearly $10k vacation to expand my horizons? I doubt it...
The answer is always going to be: It depends. Right?
Sometimes college isn't worth it at all, elite or not.
He would repeatedly say to me: "I'd rather hire people whom got B's in school and had a social life than automatons who got A's." and "College is like driving cross-country. You can get there in a pinto or a Mercedes, what you see and learn along the way is up to you!"
Perhaps this is a great analogy in more than he meant. Either car enables you to do great things, but if you're unlucky and get hit by a truck, the merc was the safer option.
Depending on the school and program, I would say that you don’t necessarily have to be an automaton to get As. Knowing how to do coursework strategically goes a long way in facilitating both getting As and having a social life.
The order in my mind is:
1) STEM elite 2) Scholarship elite 3) STEM local 4) Any other program local 5) Trade 6) Any other program elite
This order does not apply to wealthy people. Those who come from wealth can apply to an elite college and get an elite education and work for their friends without stressing out about school debt.
Of course, you could always say that this is a function of inherent talent and drive more than institution, which is possible, but even then it's just a vital social signal and leaves out the 99% who could never stand a chance of getting into elite institutions like me.
It very much depends on the degree. I don't see any Nuclear Engineering luminaries coming from Harvard, and no more coming from Stanford.
- An NC State Nuclear Engineering alumn
At Stanford, you get a good technical education, but you also get contacts that will become important players in tech. At Harvard, you get contacts that will be important players in government, business, and media. At Random Public University, you get contacts who become players at the state level.
I graduated from NC State in 2000 and I've had a really awesome, rewarding career filled with interesting problems and fun. As an engineering manager I've had many, many colleagues who have advanced degrees from fancy schools that I never could have gotten into (or afforded). I use stuff that I learned at NCSU in my job every day, and am extremely thankful to have gotten such a high quality education at such a bargain basement price (in-state tuition was very cheap, I used to put it on my credit card). I've never felt like my degree or lack of a fancy school has hindered me.
As a hiring manager, unless the person is coming directly out of school, I don't even look at their education. There's a great many people that I've hired where I had no idea if they had a degree at all, much less CS.
I will always wonder how things would have turned out if I'd gone to a top-tier school instead. No doubt it would have been different. But I cannot imagine how things could have turned out any better for me than they did.
Nowadays I care much more about an applicant's github repo than I do about their diploma.
With an MIT founder, we hire a lot of MIT grads. After that, I didn't think it mattered much, but then I was involved in hiring a summer intern. HR gave me a couple hundred resumes, almost all from elite schools: MIT, Harvard, CMU, Brown, Yale, etc. I ended up picking someone from Yale, who was fantastic, but I can't help but thinking that the apparent school filter kept me from seeing a lot of great candidates.
Elite colleges aren't worth it if you want to live an average life. If you want to be a 9-5 corporate desk jockey, then going to an elite college probably doesn't matter.
If you want to excel - a prominent businessman, politician, journalist, scientist, etc, then going to an elite college is most definitely an asset.
I find it strange how the elites are telling the masses elite colleges isn't worth it. I bet they don't tell their own children that. But that's understanable. Why would they want more competition to power for their own children.
I have given a lot of interviews at this point, and while I personally cannot speak for everyone (nor does my word override a statistic), but I haven't noticed a huge difference in the quality of applicants between a normal state college, and a brand-name college. Granted, I interview for the "9-5 corporate desk-jockey" jobs, so maybe I'm not getting the next Von Neumann applying.
That said, I have worked for New York University (which I believe is considered a pretty-good school, and is certainly expensive), and I got to see the whole cross section of professors from basically every brand of university. My conclusion? Largely inconclusive: it largely made no difference where the people went to school (though admittedly the dropouts (including me) were typically not as bright).
If you are Asian, and if you go to UCLA, your chance of getting into McKinsey or BlackStone or Goldman Sachs is very slim. However, if you go to HYP, your chances of getting into elite careers are pretty high. I had seen some conversations on collegeboard, where high school students are aiming for such jobs.
If you sincerely get into elite programs by merit and demonstrated talent, and you do not come from a wealthy family, then elite institutions don’t help you much at all. I’ve never once had doors open because of my degrees, but certainly have had doors closed presumably because people form a pre-conceived opinion about me or believe the degree prices me out of the market.
I’ve experienced similar things when I’ve shared my Stack Overflow profile during interviews. I am very highly ranked in a number of relevant technology tags, but this has not once helped me in any way, yet it has seemed like a liability.
Meanwhile, I know plenty of great engineers from a variety of “non-elite” schools, and they have never expressed having this problem. They express just having a pretty normal success rate with job applications and being evaluated for their skill and experience, and never sensing that their degrees have any significant effect on anything.
Being a “success outlier” often just puts a target on your back. People will write you off as elitist, coming from a wealthy family, getting places in life through favoritism, and never stop to meet you and see what kind of person you are or question their assumptions.
Hell, even I'm getting coding job offers and I haven't programmed professionally in a decade.
Where are you (geographically) that having an elite degree in a heavily in-demand field is keeping you from getting offers?
In general in tech there is a huge, huge surplus of applicants (especially in my field of machine learning). My personal perspective after running a few teams inside bigger companies and dealing with corporate recruiting is that occasional hires from bootcamps and things exists mostly to suppress wages for other applicants. Companies are deeply resistant to paying market wages, and sometimes see that as a way around it.
The “scarcity” in tech hiring is a total fiction.
I know both these statements to be categorically false because I know a number of recent bootcamp "graduates" in the LA that were offered jobs straight out of graduation. As in, pretty much all of them. Most of these guys wouldn't have cut it as junior programmers before the "scarcity crisis" but right now they're making $75k/year coding React apps.
The recruiter spam you are receiving for coding jobs that don’t apply to you is not evidence of much besides the widely known inefficiency of tech recruiters. They’ll spam out recruitment emails to just about anyone, but ultimately won’t actually present you for the roles.
The coding jobs do apply to me, in the sense that they're for roles I would have qualified for and possibly considered back when I was still coding. Moreover, they aren't "recruiter spam," they're contacts from when I used to program.
In general in tech there is a huge, huge surplus of applicants (especially in my field of machine learning).
Ah. This is the problem. We're both talking about different fields, so our experiences are going to be different. For developers, there's a scarcity crisis and a lot of companies (though not all) will hire almost anyone. For ML, it appears there's the opposite--possibly because ML was oversold to graduates as the next big thing.
For example, $75k for a junior position, fresh out of a CS undergrad program, is a low salary for a major urban area like LA... like 30-50k too low. They can only do this because the market’s flooded.
Indeed that's what junior colleges are all about, a second chance. Look, rich people who can afford elite high schools, etc, are going to dominate elite admissions. But allowing hard working kids from the wrong side of tracks multiple chances helps even that playing field.
Case in point, a buddy of mine, wrong side of the tracks, arrest record, freaky smart, he started over in junior college, killed it, went to Cal, murdered it, went to Columbia, got bored with it and became a quant.
But even UMass Amherst is a pretty elite school when it comes to CS (~T30). It's not MIT level but it's still pretty highly ranked.
I went to a school that's just on the cusp of being irrelevant in ranking (~T50) and even the smart kids from my school don't get into elite grad programs for the most part. Most of them just continue their CS PhDs at the same school even with 4.0 GPAs and good GREs.