
Are Ivy League schools overrated? - forrest_t
http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/30/23581/
======
temuze
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 students
graduate debt free. It's hard to compare other deals to that. Source:
[http://www.princeton.edu/admission/financialaid/](http://www.princeton.edu/admission/financialaid/)

And of course, many top tier non-Ivy schools are similarly awesome by these
criterias and should be grouped together with them in this discussion.

That said, the concept of "going to a good school" is absolutely overrated by
employers, as is the concept of needing to go to through a four year liberal
arts education. I know many hackers with a high school education who could run
rings around some of my ex-classmates when doing honest-to-god software
engineering.

However, what college education lacks in practicality, it makes up for it in
the experience. Having four years to learn what you want and having fun with
brilliant young people? Sounds awesome, sign me up again.

~~~
dobbsbob
Princeton has Brian Kernighan as an academic advisor
[http://www.cs.princeton.edu/ugrad/becoming-cs-
major](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.

~~~
geebee
Many low income students don't apply to the ivies because they believe they
can't afford them. It often turns out that they would have gotten such good
financial support that they end up paying more for a local state school.

------
georgemcbay
Not a new or controversial idea here, I'm 41 and this was the prevailing
wisdom back when I was in high school and wasn't a new idea then either.

Going to an Ivy League school is and always has been mostly about having more
"elite" networking opportunities and having an early social proof that you can
get into an "elite" club.

The value of the actual education received (especially at the undergrad level
where access to more exotic lab equipment and such is less of an issue for
most majors) is highly variable in terms of the school, the student, and the
overlap between the two, just like in any other college setting.

------
mathattack
_This fits in with something I’ve noticed. I know this sounds harsh, but when
I run across someone who is at the top of their profession and yet seems
woefully underwhelming, they often have Ivy League BAs in non-demanding majors
(For example, Jeff Zucker, Harvard, History. John Tierney, Yale, American
Studies). My working hypothesis is that, while everyone who graduates from an
elite school has an advantage in terms of reputation and networks, the actual
difficulty of completing certain degrees isn’t that high relative to non-elite
schools. Thus a history degree from Harvard isn’t worth that much more than a
history degree from a Cal State school._

This has been my experience. I used to hold Harvard, Yale and Princeton in
very high esteem. Then I met a dumb as rocks Princeton history major. In his
defense, he was in a Sales job, and admitted that Lacrosse helped him get in.

It isn't like history majors in large public schools have any higher of a mean
competence.

I reached the opposite conclusion as the article, though. If you're going to
major in something soft and what to go anywhere, you have to go somewhere
good. You can have a good career with a CS degree from either Yale or Ohio
State. If you want to have a good career with a Journalism or History degree,
you really need to go to Yale.

~~~
hga
" _and admitted that Lacrosse helped him get in_ "

Indeed. Once you factor in the athletes and worse, legacy admits, Ivies have
real trouble building an all around good class by the metrics most in this
discussion are using (by their metrics, they're education the future leaders
of the US and world, so...).

MIT and no doubt CalTech have a great advantage in that the first calculation
in admissions is "can they do the work?"; that, which is a rather high bar,
plus tremendous self-selection in applicants, results in a somewhat different
student body. Or at least compared to nearby Harvard by my observations.

~~~
mathattack
CalTech is the tops in my book on this. I don't have a huge sample size, but
they are all rock stars. I've met a few less than impressive MITers.

What surprises me is that the Ivies can still have such high average test
scores and GPAs despite all the legacies and athletes.

What surprised me about Princeton was that it was Lacrosse. Lacrosse. It
convinced me that I want to send my kids to fencing lessons after their math
circles.

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

[1] [http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-
league...](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-
should-judge-students-standardized-tests)

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).

~~~
ihnorton
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)

------
ianstallings
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 the two guys I work directly with have
advanced degrees from MIT and Harvard so I can see first hand how that
experience has already helped them.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
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.

------
ahsanup
With improved access to high-quality online education, we may soon be asking
"Are all colleges overrated?"

(Though I think the college experience plays an important part in a teenager's
maturation process.)

~~~
bluedino
It will take a generation for the mindset to change that a purely online
degree or a collection of classes from something like EdX are equal to 'Degree
from State U'.

~~~
ahsanup
For the masses, yes. But for those willing to take their future into their own
hands, I think you'll see a shift away from traditional college education.

Really think that apprenticeship should make a comeback in America. I know I
would have benefited from spending some time in industry after high school.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
The problem is that the reason for getting a degree isn't to become "educated"
it's to be come employable. And until employers start to look at an online
degree or an apprenticeship as comparable in value to attending college for 4
years it won't make sense for any rational person to take that path.

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

~~~
santaclaus
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.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
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.

------
dmix
YC/pg seems to be obsessed with Ivy league kids. When I went to startup school
it was at Stanford and I met quite a few ivy league kids from the east coast.
Plus a lot of YC companies I read about seem to be started by them.

~~~
jaekwon
That's not surprising because YC is the Ivy league of incubators.

~~~
delinquentme
looooool so you're mentioning this comment on your application? Edit: Yes we
all know YC is a great accelerator, but the ass kissing ?

------
taude
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 more in the History 101 class
or even your intro to Data Structures class.

~~~
vonklaus
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.

------
unknownian
I started my first year of college this semester at an Ivy. There are flaws,
but overall the experience is pretty great, or at least, being around famous
professors/thinkers is. I wish it could be extended to more people though.
"Egalitarian" opportunities in education seem to go against the idea that some
students will work harder and perform better than others though.

------
raverbashing
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)

~~~
dfxm12
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...

~~~
waterlesscloud
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.

------
aardvarks
I'm an academic - have worked at a variety of institutions but never
officially been at an ivy league school, so I can't strictly speaking claim
ground truth. But my impressions are, sure, if your idea of the "education"
part of college is to (sometimes) go to classes required for your degree and
do exactly what the instructor tells you and that's it, probably it doesn't
make a huge difference in terms of academics where you went to school.
Everybody uses (almost) the same textbooks, after all. And academic jobs are
scarce enough that two instructors of the same subject at very different
institutions may actually have had similar undergraduate educations and
approaches to undergraduate teaching.

What ivy league and other private research universities excel at academically
is scholarly opportunities outside class assignments. If you want to
reconstruct 17th century pipe organs or build robotic insects or experiment on
extremophiles in Greenland or whatever, there might very well be someone who
wants a student to help with something like that. Plus they probably have
money to cover your expenses and pay you a stipend for it, and you don't have
to compete with 500 other people for the chance. More generally, if there is a
particular academic topic you as a student want to learn all about, a top
university has a better chance than most places of having someone or something
that can help you. But the student has to show up with the initiative and
persistence to get that.

The hard part is admissions: what's the best way to find students who will of
their own volition seek this kind of thing out? The simple answer would seem
to be to look for kids who have a history of doing that and succeeding. But
instead that produced this arms race of people seeking lots of extra academic
experiences _purely for the sake of getting into college_ and then burning out
and not wanting to continue once they got there.

~~~
mathattack
_What ivy league and other private research universities excel at academically
is scholarly opportunities outside class assignments._

This is actually true at any school. At large state schools, there are
professors doing real research. The difference with the ivy leagues is very
few students actually seek these experiences out. (I was one of four
undergrads applying for a paid research position during my Big School CS
undergrad. I got it as a sophomore because the competition was weak.) I still
would have had a better experience at Stanford or MIT, but I think it's more a
peer effect.

 _But instead that produced this arms race of people seeking lots of extra
academic experiences purely for the sake of getting into college and then
burning out and not wanting to continue once they got there._

This is very true. I was very surprised how many of my friends dropped their
extracurriculars in college. The only friends who stayed in music were the
ones (like me) who went to large state schools - in essence because we were
doing it for it's own sake. Turning college admissions into an extracurricular
quest (in addition to a "Don't dare get a B" risk aversion) seems very wrong.

My sense is that this gets sorted out in the end. After a few years of work,
all the nonsense about school admissions is gone.

~~~
aardvarks
_What ivy league and other private research universities excel at academically
is scholarly opportunities outside class assignments.

This is actually true at any school. At large state schools, there are
professors doing real research. The difference with the ivy leagues is very
few students actually seek these experiences out._

I completely agree (having been at a large state school) that there are many
professors doing high quality research at state schools. I think the
difference is (as you suggest) the funding and competition. Funding and even
for-credit programs for undergraduate research were (I found) much more
limited at state schools. You'd have 10 students, all with straight A's,
applying for a single one-semester research assistantship that'd grant 1
course credit. At the same time I know of ivy school subject-specific
fellowships of thousands of dollars for summer travel/study for which perhaps
only 2 or 3 people would apply simply because there were so many other
opportunities available. The net result is that if you're at an ivy, that kind
of experience is much much easier to get.

------
AmyWasHere
To be completely honest, I think that people diligent enough can get the same
level of education at almost any college. The other thing is connections you
may establish and job offers you may get. But other than that you can depend
only on yourself. For example at
[http://britishessaywriter.co.uk/](http://britishessaywriter.co.uk/) I've read
that about 70% of knowledge you get through self-learning. Teachers and
educators are there to merely guide you (yet of course it’s better if they
know their thing). All in all, I’d recommend trying all the options and
choosing the one with the optimal conditions.

------
programminggeek
The network you can make and the doors it opens are tremendous and without
them you have to hustle in a completely different area than you otherwise
would.

It's not that they give you a free win, but rather an advantage you can play
later as needed. Getting a degree from a no name liberal arts school or a
smaller state school is not going to mean the same thing for certain pursuits.

That said, an overachiever can do amazing things with limited opportunity.
Advantage or disadvantage, it depends on how you use it.

------
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)!

------
geebee
As someone who attended UC campuses for both undergrad and grad, I do have a
strong innate sympathy for large public research institutions. I think that
the methodology used by the very influential US News rankings rewards keeping
the undergraduate student body small, with relatively few low income students,
and penalizes universities for doing the opposite. Almost everything about
staying small with lots of money (and fewer low income students) bumps up your
numbers. Lower admissions rate, higher SAT scores, better graduation rates.
It's all a positive, and there's no penalty for being small and affluent, so
why not?

So taking a step back and looking at it as a student, it's an easy call -
especially when these elite schools are offering lots of financial aid. If
you're high income, tuition doesn't matter. If you're low income, you'll get
great financial aid, often better than you would have gotten at a state
school.

You'll also get more support. You're much less likely to get kicked out of an
"impacted" major (these things don't really exist at elite schools, but people
sure do get kicked out of their preferred major at state schools). You're more
likely to graduate. Professors and staff aren't trying to accommodate a
student body 5 times (or more) the size of a private, so the access is better,
less harried. As a grad student at Cal, I heard a bit about Stanford
"coddling", and I don't buy it. Supporting a promising student in her quest to
major in engineering rather than kicking her out because she got a B- in
physics and calculus her first semester in college isn't coddling, it's doing
right by your students and is perfectly compatible with high standards. The
opposite is, in my opinion, an outrageous waste of talent. Hey, I said I'm
sympathetic to UCs but I don't like everything about them.

The only real downside I can see here is that you might not quite understand
what's happening out there to higher education. At UCSD, I met a young woman
who had to give up on college because her father was claiming her as a
dependent, it was messing up her financial aid, and she just needed to work a
while. I knew a guy who was trying to major in computer science while paying
the rent with a part time job at Nordstrom. And that's at UCSD, a relatively
well off and "elite" public! I wouldn't want our future leaders to be too
insulated from this kind of thing. I actually do think the best leaders for
the future probably should be coming from top public research universities
rather than elite privates.

The washington monthly college rankings (and explanation of methodology) were
really eye-opening. They asked "what have you done for us lately" \- the idea
being that if universities are going to receive massive amounts of federal
research support (privates get a ton of government support) and enjoy a tax-
exempt status, we should be asking what they do for everyone, rather than only
those who are able to attend them. I'd recommend reading it for yourself, but
generally speaking, they looked at public service (including military
service), research output especially in science and engineering, and
contribution to social mobility (percentage of low income students). They
didn't consider sheer scale, though I think they should - if you can do this
for 25,000 undergrads rather than just 5,000 on the same budget, shouldn't
that also be considered a positive quality?

By this standard, ivies (according to wash monthly) do appear to be overrated
(though interestingly, Stanford still scores very high). They generally don't
produce the same quantity and quality of research in science and engineering
that you see out of elite publics, they don't enroll very many students, and
they especially don't enroll very may low income students (though those they
do enroll are treated very generously).

UCs and other elite state schools, on the other hand, rise dramatically to the
top.

So are "ivies" overrated? Well, depends on whether you get to attend one. If
you're outside the wall, asking what universities are contributing the most to
the general welfare, UCLA is probably a lot more valuable than an ivy. But if
you get in? Well, you might want to seriously consider going to that ivy.

------
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.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Where are you getting that IQ data from? I go to one of the Ivies and have
never had an IQ test nor have most of my peers I would imagine.

(That said I agree with your premise, my peers at school aren't significantly
more intelligent than my high school classmates who went to good, but not
great, private and state colleges).

~~~
michaelochurch
I had an unhealthy obsession with IQ testing. A phase long ago. I remember
reading that the average Harvard IQ tested at 130 and the other Ivies in the
mid-120s. You can guess based on SAT figures, noting that extracurricular
factors (paradoxically) decrease the IQ/SAT correlation (people who beat a top
school's extracurricular game are more likely than average to have prepped for
SATs and have scores that overstate their IQs). So a 1500 average SAT (out of
1600) ends up mapping to a group average IQ around 130, even though a typical
individual with a 1500 SAT is probably around 140 IQ.

These numbers fluctuate and it's quite possible that the increasing usage of
socioeconomic/extracurricular criteria has decreased the gap.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Ah interesting. Did you find any notable results? My understanding is that IQ
(as a proxy for intelligence) matters up to a certain cutoff and beyond that
its importance drops off (i.e. you might want the person who writes the
software for the airplane you're riding to have a 130 IQ, but beyond that the
quality of the work doesn't improve much).

