Posted on 12/25/2008 7:56:25 AM PST by SeekAndFind
I’m willing to bet that in the long run the math still works out for the Ivies (especially the top three). But that doesn’t even tell the whole story.
What if you want to get into law, MBA or med school? Having that Ivy undergrad will give you a better shot of getting in. And then after med school having that pedigree will again help you matching for residency at a better place.
Decent people learn that lesson by mid-career and leave to start their own companies. Probably why the government hates small business owners so much - they aren't easily corruptible.
An Ivy League education is indispensible if you intend to rise to the top of a Fortune 500 company or a major political party. But so are sociopathic tendencies. ;)
The liberal yankees aren’t going to like this. They all know that southern people are nothing but ignorant, uneducated, rednecks.
>>>The vast majority of Ivy faculty on the humanities is commie. There is no way of putting it mildly. You can’t study under great academics in these areas, unless you become yourself a flaming liberal.<<<
You are right, but just because somebody is a commie doesn’t mean they can’t be a brilliant professor. I studied in Cornell, and my favorite professor was a belligerent liberal, but also a great expert on renaissance Florence. We would have a back and forth about Bush and the war, but when it came to Italian history, his instruction was priceless.
That’s right, and don’t even think of applying to some law firms or financial firms if you haven’t got the Ivy degree, sometimes particularly to the undergrad level.
Contacts? Introductions? The leg up for your next generation? There’s a reason so many upper middle class families make themselves miserable trying to get their kids in to the right school.
Yes, you are of course right in this regard. Political stances mean little when the area of interest has little current political meaning. I was thinking more about PoliSci, and contemporary history.
Just a guess of my own, but-- Anybody in the oil bidness.
Rule number one for happiness: don’t compare yourself to others. This article is fully of pointless envy. Most people that pay the extra expense of going to an Ivy league schools don’t do it to get a higher paying job.
Let me give you a perspective from someone who had the opportunity to go to an Ivy but did not.
I had very high SAT scores (I won’t boast). Thus I got offered admission into both Harvard and Yale. However, due to the fact that my father was a middle class guy with a decent income I was not offered a substantial scholarship. I would have had to take loans of about $100-$120K to finish my education.
I chose to go on to one of the most highly ranked Public schools in Computer Science where I ended up graduating after only racking up a loan of about $30K
In the short term I felt I had made the right decision as I graduated with much less debt.
However, in my nearly 20 year career I have now come to regret my decision. For better or for worse (we don’t make the rules of the world we live in) an Ivy League stamp opens up a lot of doors. I would have progressed much faster in my career had I had that stamp. I saw many underqualified people (note: I said UNDER qualifed not UN qualified) progress to high ranks of management due to that stamp.
As another poster said above, that made me open a small business because I could not deal with the frustration of doors not opening fast enough. That is a good thing to be sure. However, even over here, atleast in the tech industry, when you go and visit the VCs on Sand Hill Road, your educational pedigree is openly discussed.
My advice to anyone able to get into an Ivy League college is to do it. Don’t hesitate. Yes, you will have high debt on graduation but you will make it up in spades.
Just my 2 cents (which would have been 50 cents had I graduated from the Ivy League college)
This may be true, certainly for gov't and quasi-gov't positions like Fannie Mae, and prestigious financial insitutions ... whatever remains of them after the ongoing shake-out.
But at some point I wonder if private employers will start to recognize that Ivy grads are not as good hires as someone from, say, Grove City College or Georgia State.
Someone here on FR posted once that he was already seeing employers shy away from hiring Ivy grads, who tended to hold themselves in too high esteem and to underperform.
Justice Antonin Scalia: J.D. Harvard Law
Chief Justice John Roberts: A.B. History, Harvard College, J.D., Harvard Law (Roberts was President of the Harvard Law Review, a position held later by Barack Obama).
Justice Clarence Thomas: J.D. Yale Law
Justice Samuel Alito: J.D. Yale Law
President George W. Bush, B.A. History Yale, MBA, Harvard Business School.
On the flip side, I knew a software engineer at a major Aerospace company. Nice enough guy, but kind of a flake who didn’t really have it together. After I while, I found out he graduated from Princeton, which really kinda of surprised me. He did not come off as I would have expected a Princeton grad to act. In his case anyway, an Ivy league education did him less good ‘cause people were frequently underwhelmed when they found out his pedigree.
Its good if you want to be a Washington politician and have a cushy job for life there. They seem to be lacking in common sense, but are brimming with greed.
RBG81,
Yeah, I don’t doubt it. Just going to an Ivy League college will not solve all your problems. However, to give a contrarian point of view, I bet the only reason that guy keeps getting jobs is because of his degree. That guy, with any other degree, would not be able to land decent jobs or hold them.
Again, I know this sounds horribly unfair. But life is a bitch and a horribly unfair one at that
No.
They seem to have mastered learning to make $millions from what should be illegal, legal.
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