These days, celebrities get easily accepted into Ivly League universities. It tells you everything you need to know about the institutions these days.
Shoot - the story this article refers to is far scarier:
http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/02/03/964781/citizen-activist-grates-on-state.html
I’ll take an engineer who spent 5-10 years as a welder or electrician and THEN went to college over an ivy league degree any day.
If your child was planning on going straight in to graduate school to pursue a course of study, then consider attending a local college (CUNY or SUNY even) for four years and save your money for grad school. College is 128 credits. Grad school is considerably less. A college diploma is a college diploma.
Ivy League schools (and those like them) will just suck you dry in your finances, just so you can have a name on a piece of paper, which may or may not mean anything to you in the future.
An Ivy League degree should mean immediate disqualification from holding public office, IMHO......
There is a very simple explanation for the credentialism all around us.
A much more effective way to determine whether a potential employee will be any good is to administer an IQ or aptitude test.
But the courts have declared these illegal because of their disparate impact on minorities. So employers go with a “college degree” as a requirement even where it isn’t really. They figure they’ll get some minimal level of competence, at least.
Personally, I never got the chance to go to college, and I work in a professional field where most of my colleagues have PhDs or at minimum masters. Very seldom am I questioned about my credentials, since as I am obviously competent they just assume I have them.
Say what you will about the Ivies. I notice they produce Ted Kennedys and W. F. Buckleys alike.
I’ve also noticed that otherwise pleasant folks who didn’t get into their top-choice school can harbor a sort of irrational bitterness for decades.
Thomas Sowell has written extensively on this topic, that the generally-accepted “prestigious” colleges and universities actually short-change their students in the practical quality of the education they get compared to lesser-known schools.
I can’t distill Dr. Sowell’s words as well as he could, but the gist of it is that the “prestigious” schools are anymore trading almost entirely on a by-gone reputation. They may have famous and world-class talent in the faculty, but those professors rarely if ever actually teach or interact with students. Students spend most of their time interacting only with junior staff and teacher’s aids instead of the high-caliber professors that supposedly drew them to the school. He even pokes a few sticks at his own beloved Stanford as guilty of the same stuff.
He argues that at many smaller colleges or even on-line colleges (he specifically calls out the U. of Phoenix as an example) the student actually gets a far higher quality education. Prestige alone doesn’t confer any more information and knowledge to students. In fact it is often less.
I’ve probably been part of >100 interviews hiring PhDs for industrial research positions. It struck me early on that the work of Ivy league candidates was much less impressive than that from the person graduating from the average university. Probably because they expect to get a job based on the school name rather than their accomplishments. Candidates from a typical university have no such illusion. I did find that candidates from the “top school” did have a much easier time getting interviews.
The charge against those people in NC is such uber-BS. NC code G.S. 89C-3(6)a says this:
“A person shall be construed to practice or offer to practice engineering, within the meaning and intent of this Chapter ... who, by verbal claim, sign, advertisement, letterhead, card, or in any other way represents himself to be a professional engineer, or through the use of some other title implies that he is a professional engineer or that he is registered under this Chapter... .”
Don’t see anything in there about countering some gov’t report with actual data and analysis.
This is just some corrupt gov’t pukes throwing their gov’t backed weight around. And the beat goes on...
My sister used to be an executive assistant for a Zurich headquartered consulting firm that ONLY hired Ivy League graduates. When she wasn’t teaching them how to use a copy machine for the 50th time, she was either making service appointments for their BMW’s or reserving tee times. She said they were mostly pleasant until they wanted to make sure you didn’t forget from where and from whose loins they sprang