
Is Elite College Worth It? Maybe Not - drkimball
https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-elite-college-worth-it-maybe-not-11553084146
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got2surf
I had a unique opportunity of taking a year of classes at a good state school
(in the top 100 for most STEM fields), and then went to an "elite" school for
undergrad (taking a mix of CS/non-CS courses at each).

You can absolutely find motivated peers and professors at state schools,
particularly if you look at places like the honors college. If you want to
land a good job, go to a good grad school, etc (which is the goal for most
people), all of that is 100% possible from a state school.

However, if you want to do something non-traditional (startups, research
abroad, "choose your own adventure" style careers), I found that the "elite"
school offered a lot more opportunity. Part of that is due to funding/size,
where top schools have more money to allocate to students who ask for it.
Students at elite schools have more support on average (from family as well as
the school itself), so they tend to have more opportunities open, earlier.

It's like the difference between a big city and a small town. Plenty of people
are successful without living in a huge city, so it's definitely possible. You
could argue that the average drive of folks in a big city is higher, but a lot
of that has to do with resources and opportunities as well.

The top students at a good state school would absolutely fit in at an elite
school. The only difference I saw was in the support/resources they had before
coming to college.

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arcanus
> startups, research abroad, "choose your own adventure" style careers

I'd add scientific research experience. I had a professor who I worked for and
gave me research experience. I was meeting with him 1-1 as if I was a graduate
student of his at my top-25 undergraduate university. I also got a publication
out of it. This gave me a huge leg up in my graduate applications for PhD, and
it helped me determine that was something I was interested in to start with.

That sort of very personal relationship is much harder to find at the big
state schools.

~~~
got2surf
That's a great point. One of my favorite parts of college was small research-
based classes with 10-15 undergrads/grad students. The level of personal
interaction and feedback from professors was the most valuable part.

That being said, I was fortunate enough to have similar experiences re:
research at the state school as well (a professor who went out of his way to
mentor me, leading to a few publications). It was definitely harder to find
(because of how many other students professors at big state schools have to
deal with), but it was more a function of professors' time than their
willingness.

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rb808
The problem I see it is the bar is so high that the only way to get into elite
schools is to spend your childhood practicing standardized tests and doing
prescribed extra-curricular activities. As a result I suspect these days the
elite universities must be filled with really dull people who wont achieve the
same "success" as previous generations at those institutions.

~~~
WhompingWindows
Your post is rather presumptuous. Do you consider playing classical piano,
debating important issues, and helping the community as "really dull"? Because
that's what I did that was "prescribed extra-curricular activity." And yet, I
loved it all and got accepted to multiple "elite" schools. I didn't grind test
prep either, acing my schools' coursework had prepared me over many years.

The real issue with these modern elite school graduates is that either they
are massively indebted or that they come from an increasingly insulated
wealthy class, not that they are dull.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _The real issue with these modern elite school graduates is that either they
> are massively indebted or that they come from an increasingly insulated
> wealthy class..._

This issue actually can't be overstated. It's a real problem not only with
elite schools, but even with a lot of non-elite graduates as well.

Not sure what a good solution for that is though?

~~~
WhompingWindows
It may be the most boring solution of all: education. Without someone telling
our 16-18 year olds the idea of VALUE in education, they will end up over-
spending. See the story below for my own analysis of myself:

When I compare my skill-set and knowledge-set now to 12 years ago, when I was
18, I am remarkably astounded by the huge amount of $$ I casually dropped on
an elite education. Even with $20k paid by merit scholarships and research
grants, I was dropping $40k yearly for an education that was maybe 10-15%
better than what I could've gotten for $5k yearly at a local school. If I took
that $35k yearly and invested it into the stock market, I'd probably be about
$200k richer today. Is that 10% of a difference really worth $200k to me now?
Is a slightly deeper/broader knowledge better than half a home, in my MCOL
area? Is it better than a Tesla and a yearly $10k vacation to expand my
horizons? I doubt it...

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checkyoursudo
I went to professional school and graduate school with some people with elite
undergraduate educations. Of the few that expressed something like an opinion
about it, I would say that most of them didn't regret going to elite colleges,
but that doing so certainly wasn't obviously worth it.

The answer is always going to be: It depends. Right?

Sometimes college isn't worth it at all, elite or not.

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
Just a counterpoint: The decade after undergrad is probably not when the
network gained by an elite undergraduate education is most useful.

~~~
checkyoursudo
Yes, that's a good point. Not obviously worthwhile at the time is not the same
as never-going-to-be.

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FlyingSideKick
My Grandfather was employee #3 at his company and over 35 years of hard work
eventually became CEO and helped grow the company until it was listed on the
NYSE. He preferred to hire people whom attended state schools and with B
averages. Moreover, he thought private colleges and out of state schools were
a huge waste of money (even as CEO and worth tens of millions lived in a
modest 3 bedroom house and drove a 20 year old car).

He would repeatedly say to me: "I'd rather hire people whom got B's in school
and had a social life than automatons who got A's." and "College is like
driving cross-country. You can get there in a pinto or a Mercedes, what you
see and learn along the way is up to you!"

~~~
rb808
> "College is like driving cross-country. You can get there in a pinto or a
> Mercedes, what you see and learn along the way is up to you!"

Perhaps this is a great analogy in more than he meant. Either car enables you
to do great things, but if you're unlucky and get hit by a truck, the merc was
the safer option.

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howard941
[https://outline.com/wWr2v3](https://outline.com/wWr2v3)

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glitchc
It depends on the degree. For STEM, not so much. For law, business,
humanities, absolutely.

~~~
akhilcacharya
I disagree. How many NC State grads become tech luminaries? Very few. How many
Stanford, Harvard, UWash, UIUC, even Cornell or Yale CS (not as highly ranked)
become tech luminaries? A lot more. (FWIW, it's so hard to get into CS at
UIUC/UWash today it's equivalent to getting into an Ivy).

Of course, you could always say that this is a function of inherent talent and
drive more than institution, which is possible, but even then it's just a
vital social signal and leaves out the 99% who could never stand a chance of
getting into elite institutions like me.

~~~
pcsanwald
Being a "tech luminary" is a pretty high bar, no? Who would self-identify as
this anyways?

I graduated from NC State in 2000 and I've had a really awesome, rewarding
career filled with interesting problems and fun. As an engineering manager
I've had many, many colleagues who have advanced degrees from fancy schools
that I never could have gotten into (or afforded). I use stuff that I learned
at NCSU in my job every day, and am extremely thankful to have gotten such a
high quality education at such a bargain basement price (in-state tuition was
very cheap, I used to put it on my credit card). I've never felt like my
degree or lack of a fancy school has hindered me.

As a hiring manager, unless the person is coming directly out of school, I
don't even look at their education. There's a great many people that I've
hired where I had no idea if they had a degree at all, much less CS.

~~~
lskopwol
Remind us not to interview there lol

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strikelaserclaw
Why?...

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subpixel
I think your own drive and achievement can be compounded by the prestige of
the school you go to, but the latter is no longer a substitute for the former.

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lisper
An anecdotal but first-hand data point: I was accepted at three top-tier
schools (MIT, Stanford and Caltech) but decided to go to Virginia Tech because
they offered me a full scholarship and my family did not have deep pockets. I
ended up as a Principal at NASA, an early hire at Google, and selling a
startup I co-founded to Richard Branson (among other things).

I will always wonder how things would have turned out if I'd gone to a top-
tier school instead. No doubt it would have been different. But I cannot
imagine how things could have turned out any _better_ for me than they did.

Nowadays I care much more about an applicant's github repo than I do about
their diploma.

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SloopJon
I naively thought that "worth it" had something to do with the quality of
education. I shouldn't be surprised, after peeking at the outline.com link,
that the WSJ is evaluating strictly in terms of future income.

With an MIT founder, we hire a lot of MIT grads. After that, I didn't think it
mattered much, but then I was involved in hiring a summer intern. HR gave me a
couple hundred resumes, almost all from elite schools: MIT, Harvard, CMU,
Brown, Yale, etc. I ended up picking someone from Yale, who was fantastic, but
I can't help but thinking that the apparent school filter kept me from seeing
a lot of great candidates.

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lskopwol
These kinds of questions are an entirely subjective debate. What’s up with
these pat on the back articles?

~~~
hitpointdrew
You didn't hear? Journalism is dead.

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gabbygab
How many WSJ journalists come from elite college? How many of them are sending
their children to elite colleges? I bet most to both categories.

Elite colleges aren't worth it if you want to live an average life. If you
want to be a 9-5 corporate desk jockey, then going to an elite college
probably doesn't matter.

If you want to excel - a prominent businessman, politician, journalist,
scientist, etc, then going to an elite college is most definitely an asset.

I find it strange how the elites are telling the masses elite colleges isn't
worth it. I bet they don't tell their own children that. But that's
understanable. Why would they want more competition to power for their own
children.

~~~
tombert
I have to ask how much of this comes down to "reputation" more than quality of
education. I'm a dropout who largely thinks college is overrated, and even I
will be impressed by "MIT" or "Harvard" on a resume.

I have given a _lot_ of interviews at this point, and while I personally
cannot speak for everyone (nor does my word override a statistic), but I
haven't noticed a huge difference in the quality of applicants between a
normal state college, and a brand-name college. Granted, I interview for the
"9-5 corporate desk-jockey" jobs, so maybe I'm not getting the next Von
Neumann applying.

That said, I _have_ worked for New York University (which I believe is
considered a pretty-good school, and is certainly expensive), and I got to see
the whole cross section of professors from basically every brand of
university. My conclusion? Largely inconclusive: it largely made _no
difference_ where the people went to school (though admittedly the dropouts
(including me) were typically not as bright).

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povertyworld
Couldn't read due to paywall, but how many YC companies are NOT founded by
people from elite colleges? Isn't that really the point of going to an elite
college? That someone will give you money to start a company as soon as you
finish, no matter how wacky your idea? It almost seems like the old "no one
got fired for buying IBM", but updated to "no one got fired for funding
Stanford grads". Of course, the defense will be that elite schools are a good
"signal" of competency, but at the same time VCs shrug their shoulders and say
a 90% failure rate is unavoidable. What a signal indeed!

~~~
akhilcacharya
This is true. All of the YC founders I know of that went to my alma mater had
cofounders that went to Stanford, Harvard etc.

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raincom
'Elite' has a special meaning; otherwise, USC, UCLA would become elite
schools, just because some families bribed some coach to let in their kids.

If you are Asian, and if you go to UCLA, your chance of getting into McKinsey
or BlackStone or Goldman Sachs is very slim. However, if you go to HYP, your
chances of getting into elite careers are pretty high. I had seen some
conversations on collegeboard, where high school students are aiming for such
jobs.

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mlthoughts2018
This can cut both ways. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done well in 1-2
rounds of software interviews, to then be told the company suspects my
compensation requirements are outside their budget (even when we have not
spoken about compensation at all at that point), and it’s almost surely down
to the degree programs I went through.

If you sincerely get into elite programs by merit and demonstrated talent, and
you do not come from a wealthy family, then elite institutions don’t help you
much at all. I’ve never once had doors open because of my degrees, but
certainly have had doors closed presumably because people form a pre-conceived
opinion about me or believe the degree prices me out of the market.

I’ve experienced similar things when I’ve shared my Stack Overflow profile
during interviews. I am very highly ranked in a number of relevant technology
tags, but this has not once helped me in any way, yet it has seemed like a
liability.

Meanwhile, I know plenty of great engineers from a variety of “non-elite”
schools, and they have never expressed having this problem. They express just
having a pretty normal success rate with job applications and being evaluated
for their skill and experience, and never sensing that their degrees have any
significant effect on anything.

Being a “success outlier” often just puts a target on your back. People will
write you off as elitist, coming from a wealthy family, getting places in life
through favoritism, and never stop to meet you and see what kind of person you
are or question their assumptions.

~~~
gamblor956
In Los Angeles they're giving junior developers straight out of bootcamp $75k
because they need programmers so badly they're willing to hire anyone who can
turn on a computer. I'm told companies are even more desperate to hire
programmers in the Bay Area and NYC.

Hell, even I'm getting coding job offers and I haven't programmed
professionally in a decade.

Where are you (geographically) that having an elite degree in a heavily in-
demand field is keeping you from getting offers?

~~~
mlthoughts2018
You’ve been very badly misinformed about the prevalence of software jobs. In
fact, companies generally apply extremely difficult filters before hiring
engineers and go to great lengths to keep engineering headcount as low as they
can. Nobody is handing out tons of jobs to people out of bootcamps with no
previous formal training. The recruiter spam you are receiving for coding jobs
that don’t apply to you is not evidence of much besides the widely known
inefficiency of tech recruiters. They’ll spam out recruitment emails to just
about anyone, but ultimately won’t actually present you for the roles.

In general in tech there is a huge, huge surplus of applicants (especially in
my field of machine learning). My personal perspective after running a few
teams inside bigger companies and dealing with corporate recruiting is that
occasional hires from bootcamps and things exists mostly to suppress wages for
other applicants. Companies are deeply resistant to paying market wages, and
sometimes see that as a way around it.

The “scarcity” in tech hiring is a total fiction.

~~~
gamblor956
_In fact, companies generally apply extremely difficult filters before hiring
engineers and go to great lengths to keep engineering headcount as low as they
can. Nobody is handing out tons of jobs to people out of bootcamps with no
previous formal training._

I know both these statements to be categorically false because I know a number
of recent bootcamp "graduates" in the LA that were offered jobs straight out
of graduation. As in, pretty much all of them. Most of these guys wouldn't
have cut it as junior programmers before the "scarcity crisis" but right now
they're making $75k/year coding React apps.

 _The recruiter spam you are receiving for coding jobs that don’t apply to you
is not evidence of much besides the widely known inefficiency of tech
recruiters. They’ll spam out recruitment emails to just about anyone, but
ultimately won’t actually present you for the roles._

The coding jobs do apply to me, in the sense that they're for roles I would
have qualified for and possibly considered back when I was still coding.
Moreover, they aren't "recruiter spam," they're contacts from when I used to
program.

 _In general in tech there is a huge, huge surplus of applicants (especially
in my field of machine learning)._

Ah. This is the problem. We're both talking about different fields, so our
experiences are going to be different. For developers, there's a scarcity
crisis and a lot of companies (though not all) will hire almost anyone. For
ML, it appears there's the opposite--possibly because ML was oversold to
graduates as the next big thing.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
For general developers, the surplus of candidates is even more extreme than
machine learning. The growth of bootcamps is more about suppressing wages.

For example, $75k for a junior position, fresh out of a CS undergrad program,
is a _low_ salary for a major urban area like LA... like 30-50k too low. They
can only do this because the market’s flooded.

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akhilcacharya
The way I see it is the people that get into and go to elite universities are
multiples smarter and more accomplished than I was at 18 - honestly, I think
I'll defer to them about if something is worth it or not. I don't think
they'll make the wrong decision.

~~~
kolbe
One problem with this theory is that life continues past age 17/18\. As far as
I've been able to tell, the difference between a typical MIT admit and a
typical UMass kid is about two years of hard work. By age 20, many gunners
from bad schools have already surpassed the party crowd at elites.

~~~
CalChris
Dunno if MIT has ever been called a party school but point still taken. And I
think to continue along your line, that's what getting into a good grad school
is all about. Do well at UMass and you can get into an elite grad school.
Party at an elite and you probably won't.

Indeed that's what junior colleges are all about, a second chance. Look, rich
people who can afford elite high schools, etc, are going to dominate elite
admissions. But allowing hard working kids from the wrong side of tracks
multiple chances helps even that playing field.

Case in point, a buddy of mine, wrong side of the tracks, arrest record,
freaky smart, he started over in junior college, killed it, went to Cal,
murdered it, went to Columbia, got bored with it and became a quant.

~~~
akhilcacharya
> Do well at UMass

But even UMass Amherst is a pretty elite school when it comes to CS (~T30).
It's not MIT level but it's still pretty highly ranked.

I went to a school that's just on the cusp of being irrelevant in ranking
(~T50) and even the smart kids from my school don't get into elite grad
programs for the most part. Most of them just continue their CS PhDs at the
same school even with 4.0 GPAs and good GREs.

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xfitm3
Absolutely not.

~~~
tombert
Care to elaborate on this? It's not terribly useful input to just say
"Absolutely not".

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Simulacra
I'm not able to read this article because it requires that I am a subscriber.
Does anyone have a method of reading it otherwise? Would this be considered a
paywall?

