- Feb 7, 2013
- 3,188
- 48
I would hope that most here would understand that competing in college with some of the best and brightest kids in the nation has a lot of value to a students's undergraduate education.
This is a prime example of the garbage that passes for journalism at the WP. I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that if you took the bottom 25% of "All Schools" and lumped them in with the Ivies the numbers would be much different. The is a textbook example of an apples to oranges comparison, or maybe even apples to fruit. Comparing an Ivy or any quality school with Rudae's School of Beauty Culture-Kokomo Indiana is a bit ludicrous.
The data doesn't come anywhere close to reflecting the value of an Ivy degree...
- It includes students that didn't graduate.
- The earnings data is limited to those that received federal aid while there.
- It includes graduate students - the avg age of Harvard students is 23.65 at enrollment!
- "All schools" includes JUCOs and vocationals (e.g. barber), which have lower graduation rates and earnings.
I agree people should look at how graduates for their intended major(s) fare at the schools they're considering. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any resource whose data is highly accurate/reliable.
It's possible that the "most accurate" conclusions are all anecdotal...that our varied personalities and freedoms and ability to pursue opportunities make it nigh impossible to give the social scientists any real data to evaluate or to give such evaluations any real merit at all.Getting into a top college is no guarantee of anything.
Yes, Bill Gates got into a top college, but he dropped out. His success was due to his brains, his coding abilities, his business sense, and most importantly, the connections his father had with IBM.
I did go to an elite liberal arts college. Three of the guys I knew there are successful enough in their fields they have their own Wikipedia pages: CC, the second smartest student in my freshman math and physics classes, was once picked by Gore to be White House science adviser. He has had a really great career. Maybe going to an elite college helped him. He got to study Physics with some really smart professors and students who challenged him. He was also very interested in the philosophical aspects of science, and it was great for him to be in a college with a really good philosophy department. Had he gone elsewhere, he probably still would've been a great scientist. His science reputation was made by studying at Cornell under Carl Sagan. Maybe he did more because he went to a top college, maybe not.
The smartest kid in the class? That is another story. There was a young lady who was miles ahead of anyone else in the class. Not just that class. One time I ran across her when she had just gotten a paper returned in a class, and the professor wrote that it was the best paper he had ever seen. What happened to her? She dropped out of college and decided to devote her considerable intellect to furthering the cause of the Unification Church.
I knew another brilliant would-be physicist who was kicked out of the Unification Church because of his drug use. That took him down from being a top physics student to an average student. Not sure which of them ended up worse.
I don't know if going to an elite college hurt or helped the last two I mentioned, or if it made no difference at all.
I think one reason I was happy my DS is doing sports in college is so he will hopefully have the social support to avoid making truly bad decisions in his life.
It's possible that the "most accurate" conclusions are all anecdotal...that our varied personalities and freedoms and ability to pursue opportunities make it nigh impossible to give the social scientists any real data to evaluate or to give such evaluations any real merit at all.
And then there's this guy:
Cleveland Browns hire New York Mets' Paul DePodesta as chief strategy officer
After earning his Bachelor's in economics in 1995, he went to work as a scout for the Cleveland Indians and has enjoyed a meteoric rise since that time. He got the General Manager position with the Dodgers when he was only 31 years old.
Now he's going to work in the front office of the Cleveland Browns. I can't name many people who've jumped from the front office of a team in one major sport to the front office of a team in another major sport. Experience wise, he did play both baseball and football in college.
We can label DePodesta an outlier, but the fact of the matter is that he went to Harvard. I looked up his high school, Episcopal, located in Alexandria. The tuition is over $50,000 a year. I think it's safe to say that was probably a pretty solid investment for their family.
There was a panel discussion on the radio last night asking if in the next three years the Browns owner will look like a genius for his "outside of the box thinking," or if everyone will say "and that's why the Browns are the Browns." It was unanimous and I don't think I have to say which way everyone on the panel went.