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Are Ivy League schools overrated?

andrewgelman.com

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Re: Are Ivy League schools overrated?

#21

Post by waterlesscloud »

dfxm12 wrote: post #17
raverbashing wrote: post #12

Yes, you can compare, let's say, average income of graduates over a certain period and see that they're bigger for Ivy League graduates But of course averages lie more often than not, and I suspect that, income curves are double peaked for the Ivy League graduates (meaning that'll have the "mere mortal" avg salary and the "exceptionals" forming another peak)

But are the type of people who go to Ivy League schools different from everyone else? I mean: If you're talented enough to get into Harvard, maybe you don't need a Harvard education to succeed in life (for various definitions of "succeed"). I could have gone to an Ivy League school but chose not to. I really can't fathom having a better college & post-college experience than I did...

I could have gone to an Ivy League school and didn't, and I consider that to have been a very big mistake. The environment would have done me a lot of good.

Anyway, anecdotes are anecdotes.

Re: Are Ivy League schools overrated?

#22

Post by dobbsbob »

temuze wrote: post #14

If you're committed to going to a college and you get admitted an Ivy, you should absolutely go. Nowadays most of their financial aid plans are fantastic, the professors are amazing, you're surrounded by brilliant people and the reputation is a great perk when finding a job. Princeton, for example, has financial aid for 60% of its students and the average grant covers 96% of tuition for undergraduates. 75% of student…

Princeton has Brian Kernighan as an academic advisor http://www.cs.princeton.edu/ugrad/becoming-cs-major and their undergrad CS theory courses look incredible compared to the univ I went to, and I paid only $10k/yr less in tuition than a Princeton student.

Re: Are Ivy League schools overrated?

#23

Post by eroo »

Steven Pinker offers a very convincing dissection of the referenced Deresiewicz article [1].

[1] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league...

TL;DR:

- Deresiewicz is willfully ignorant/misleading in his pursuit of being controversial.

- Ivy league students are smart, but there are smart students everywhere.

- Admissions to Ivy league schools is not as objective as it should be. There is too much focus on fluff and not ability/potential (e.g., meaningless "volunteer work").

- College isn't for everyone, but if you're going to go, an Ivy tends to be the best place because they have the most resources (and therefore are often counter-intuitively the least expensive).

Re: Are Ivy League schools overrated?

#24

Post by michaelochurch »

By parents and students? Absolutely not.

By the world? Yeah, obviously. The average IQ at a good state school is about 120. In the Ivies, it's about 125. The standard deviation at each is about 13 points, so the 95th-percentile state school student would be 89th-percentile at an Ivy. That's not a huge difference. It's a lot smaller than the difference in job opportunities.

Here's the biggest (and underdocumented) advantage of having an elite pedigree: when you're presumed smart, you can put 100% of your energies into social polish. You don't have to (a) prove your intelligence, and (b) make the investor/patron feel important and just-slightly superior. You can focus on (b) alone, because (a) was taken care of. That's a huge advantage, because you're not serving two masters.

Within a couple hundred words of conversation, I can prove, to anyone intelligent, that I'm smarter than 90 to 99+% of the pedigreed (depending on how we define "pedigreed") people out raising seed rounds, but it's hard to do that without being a show-off and seeming like an arrogant prick.

It's like the decorative swords that noblemen used to wear. It was valuable to wear one, but unsheathing it and proving you knew how to use it was not always considered acceptable behavior.

Re: Are Ivy League schools overrated?

#25

Post by vonklaus »

taude wrote: post #10

When I first moved east, I was enamored with MIT and Harvard and the whole east-coast-prep-school-thing. Then I worked with a bunch of grads from these schools and was underwhelmed. I was expecting that they'd be smarter and better at what we were doing. That's when I figure out that you go to Ivy League schools because of the doors they open via the people you meet and network with, not because you're going to learn…

to be fair, I would imagine that on balance, kids from MIT (especially in STEM degree tracks) are more intelligent than those at a small liberal arts school. Honestly, probably most schools outside the Ivys and known tech schools like Urbana-Champagne, Harvey-Mudd, Caltech, etc.

Re: Are Ivy League schools overrated?

#26

Post by santaclaus »

tsotha wrote: post #6

Overrated based on what criteria? You don't go to an Ivy because you're going to learn more there.

You will probably learn more at Stanford or Caltech or MIT -- not that you won't get a great education at Princeton or Harvard, quite the opposite, but the real advantage of an Ivy League degree is the chance to network with the children of presidents and such.

Re: Are Ivy League schools overrated?

#27

Post by jeffreyrogers »

ianstallings wrote: post #11

I'd kill for some of the connections I've seen elite school graduates get. For instance If you go to Harvard Business and get your MBA the connections you get may very well lead to riches. The fact that you made it into a such an elite institution leads people to believe, rightly so, that you are capable of great things. So it's easier to get backing or get people to talk to you. I'm not a graduate of any college but…

I go to one of these elite schools and the primary benefit is in the connections you make. However, the worthwhile connections are generally only available to those who would have been successful regardless. For example, when I look at my friends who've landed the best jobs/internships they overwhelmingly got their interviews due to who they knew at the company already, which mainly came back to either who their parents knew (largely related to how wealthy their parents were) or what social club they were in (again, largely correlated with wealth).

So yes, the connections at elite schools are great, but they primarily serve to reinforce the same social structure that already exists. That said, there are certainly exceptions and it is possible to make these connections if you come from a less privileged background, but the odds are against you since you 1) don't know where to look to make these connections and 2) aren't like the people who you want to make connections with and so you're less likely to connect in the first place.

Re: Are Ivy League schools overrated?

#28

Post by DMac87 »

Taking a step back, doesn't it seem strange that there aren't more concrete answers to these questions - the debate devolves pretty quickly into anecdotes / commentators' perspectives, as opposed to hard data. Sample sizes should be big enough to at least answer the economic questions (the experience of those four years is of course subjective)!

Re: Are Ivy League schools overrated?

#29

Post by jeffreyrogers »

santaclaus wrote: post #26
tsotha wrote: post #6

Overrated based on what criteria? You don't go to an Ivy because you're going to learn more there.

You will probably learn more at Stanford or Caltech or MIT -- not that you won't get a great education at Princeton or Harvard, quite the opposite, but the real advantage of an Ivy League degree is the chance to network with the children of presidents and such.

Caltech or MIT, sure. I'm not as sure about Stanford though. Everyone I know at Stanford got in largely for legacy or athletics. While I have no doubt they'll be successful (based on their personalities and other intangibles) they're far from brilliant.

Additionally, as I wrote elsewhere on this thread, the networking benefits of an elite education primarily benefit those who had a good network in the first place. If you look at the type of student who lands a top finance or consulting job I'm sure you'll see the truth in this as well.

Re: Are Ivy League schools overrated?

#30

Post by ihnorton »

eroo wrote: post #23

Steven Pinker offers a very convincing dissection of the referenced Deresiewicz article [1]. [1] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league... TL;DR: - Deresiewicz is willfully ignorant/misleading in his pursuit of being controversial. - Ivy league students are smart, but there are smart students everywhere. - Admissions to Ivy league schools is not as objective as it should be. There is too much fo…

That is a great read. It has been posted several times but didn't get much traction, unfortunately.

> Admissions to Ivy league schools is not as objective as it should be. There is too much focus on fluff and not ability/potential (e.g., meaningless "volunteer work").

To expand on this a little bit: he describes the current admissions systems as "eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism that jerks teenagers and their moms around and conceals unknown mischief" and he laments that "test-based selection used to be the enlightened policy among liberals and progressives, since it can level a hereditary caste system by favoring the Jenny Cavilleris (poor and smart) over the Oliver Barretts (rich and stupid)."

(aside: I don't understand why the parent story was modded into oblivion over the course of 10 minutes)

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