Sorry, Harvard. Everyone Wants to Go to College in the South Now | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, Harvard. Everyone Wants to Go to College in the South Now

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11 pointsimpish920816 comments

I can see why someone might choose one Generic School vs. another Generic School, but versus Harvard (and other similar level schools)?

Everything else aside, schools at that level open up lifelong opportunities not possible or are much more difficult at some Generic School. If my kid got into Harvard and said he/she wanted to go to some other Generic School instead, they’d get some serious talking to. And I’d move heaven and earth to make sure they’d be able to attend (financially, etc.).

I think the framing of Generic versus Name Brand is a useful way to think about it.

There are certain industries that value a Name Brand degree: For example, big investment banks like to be able to tell their clients that they have the “best and brightest” managing their billions.

People will get distracted by whether Name Brand or Generic education is “better”, which isn’t really important from a “does the employment marketplace value this” perspective: Good students do find a way to get the education they demand wherever they are but the market may not value them equally.

And if you’re about to point to so-and-so who went to Generic and say “they did great” then clearly they did something else that the employment market valued more than a Name Brand degree. Try and figure out what that something else was, it’ll give you an edge.

I agree that there are cases where it’s not always clear cut. I had a friend who went to Columbia teaching school. Her family was doing well at the time and could afford the tuition. Fast forward a few years, she has graduated but making the salary of a typical American teacher - not very much. And her family fell into hard times. Nowadays she says she probably wouldn’t have gone to Columbia if she were to do it again.

At some point the price one has to pay exceeds the benefit one gets from being affiliated to these "luxury" brands. I guess the time has come for Harvard? $300k for an MBA is crazy in the current state of the industry when management jobs have become so scarce.

I can’t say what the threshold is, if there even is one. But a Harvard degree may still open doors that some Generic School degree may not.

Case in point - newly minted lawyers from generic law schools have been struggling to land both high paying entry level job, and even any entry level jobs in general. But Ivy League grads are supposedly still being scooped up.

Tldr: cheaper, more white, more community based.

Note that I’m not against white people who are sick of the racial and political polarization in northern universities. I actually think it’s tiring too. However, we should understand that the choice to move to the south is mostly only viable if you are white.

the south is the blackest region in the country. ole miss, mentioned in this article, is located in mississippi, the blackest state in the union. more white? that would be new england if you want that...i live in new england and the whiteness is unbearable.

there is definitely an imbalance in the student bodies compared to the regions demographics. i don't think you were talking about that though, seems like you were just pointing to an entire region and saying, "everybody there is racist" which is what non-southerners tend to do.

> ole miss, mentioned in this article, is located in mississippi, the blackest state in the union.

But what about the demographics of Ole Miss itself? A quick google (by no means authoritive) shows it has a significantly lower proportion of black students than the state itself does. And Ole Miss does have a history of racist incidents… (not that others don’t!)

I’m not saying black people shouldn’t study there but it’s a little more nuanced than “this college is in a state with lots of black people so it must be ideal”

nice attempt at a gotcha but if you read my comment i already noted that:

> there is definitely an imbalance in the student bodies compared to the regions demographics.

i went to ole miss so if you really want to debate about this... i don't have to do quick google searches... you can't find this in google: all of my black friends saw their enrollment at ole miss as a way to confront the racist history.

regardless, this is beside the point of the original claim: move south if you want to be around more white people. simply untrue in the south. yes, the university itself is whiter than the general population (which is a condition created by the racist social structures in the south and perpetuated by the university), but a student still lives in the region. the university does not exist in a vacuum.

I like how you put that "the whiteness is unbearable"

As a southerner who lived in Colorado for a while it's hard to describe exactly but I got that same feeling there.

I moved up north and was astonished at how invisible black people were. I went from living in a southern city, having black teachers, and black staff members, and black waiters, and black managers, to living in a midwestern city where there was a definite black part of town and the white part of down, and rarely did they mix.

It felt more culturally segregated than anything I experienced in the south.

That’s an interesting perspective. Thanks.

Come on, man. There's a plethora of reasons that people of all colors would rather be at Clemson or LSU than Boston College, and funny enough, some of them have to do with "viability" of the locale.

For those who are not from US, what does Northern and Southern means in these context? I only often hear about East and West divide.

"the south" is a contested definition, but generally the civil war created the distinctions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

Spoken like someone who has never been South.

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