
Any College Will Do - arthurk
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115853818747665842-ZqcThW_76BozMT1wgzstA1afvh8_20080510.html
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toby
By definition, a very small fraction of graduates attended a prestigious
college. Wouldn't it make more sense to look at the odds of an individual
reaching a certain level of (for lack of a better phrase) "corporate
achievement", depending on where they went to school?

via Forbes, the median MIT graduate has a starting salary of $72,000. The
median starting salary for all college graduates is around $43,000. Since only
50 people in the world can be CEOs of the top 50 companies at once, maybe it
makes more sense to look at numbers like this?

I'm not saying that salary should determine your choice of school, just that
this article is using a very strange metric to argue its point.

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vlad
I think a lot of points in the article made sense.

Salary might not be as good a measure of college value as how each individual
student feels about the school they attended and their performance in the real
world many years later. Related, there was one example of a student who felt
that attending community college gave him a chance to feel more confident than
he might have otherwise. (He does not say this directly, but being around
students who were like him and with similar abilities made him more confident,
as well.)

Also, the majors offered at MIT are different than those at typical schools,
which could alone account for your average salary statistic.

Next, I would not be surprised if students from top universities are more
likely to work in big cities than those who are from schools in the middle of
the country, accounting for cost of living differences and local job
opportunities.

Finally, if salary is a factor, then the cost of college should be, as well.

I think success at MIT would be that a student found the coursework
challenging, opportunities plentiful, and made lots of smart friends, and not
a potential salary or prestige. And I think those same factors are also
important for most students who succeed from other schools; in other words,
doing things that make them happy.

~~~
newsycaccount
>I think success at MIT would be that a student found the coursework
challenging, opportunities plentiful, and made lots of smart friends, and not
a potential salary or prestige. And I think those same factors are also
important for most students who succeed from other schools; in other words,
doing things that make them happy.

Looking at the CEOs of the top 50 companies doesn't tell you that at all. It
is almost like an article about how your kids highschool doesn't matter
because all of our astronauts, rockstars, and professional atheletes have come
from all over the place.

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jderick
Would be interesting to figure out # of CEOs divided by total student
population for Ivys vs state schools. Since there are few Ivys I imagine the
chance that a student from an Ivy becomes a CEO is still greater.

~~~
bd
Exactly. While it's hard to get the exact figures (as CEOs graduated over a
long time period), we can make at least some approximations.

I just run quick numbers for the year 2007:

    
    
      57,845 Ivy League undergraduate enrollment [1]
      15,386,000 Total US undergraduate enrollment [2]
    

Which makes Ivy League population just 3.76 promille of the total US
undergraduates.

Thus Ivy League gives you around 27x higher chance to be Fortune 500 CEO
compared to what you would get if the selection was random.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_league>

[2]
[http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2007/section1/table.asp?tabl...](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2007/section1/table.asp?tableID=672)

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callahad
I'm not sure I buy their assumption that an institution's success can be
measured by the quantity of CEOs it produces.

~~~
nihilocrat
I think they are trying to do just that: they are trying to argue against the
common 'widsom' that going to a prestigious school is going to get you a more
prestigious job, along with the corollary that you should rank job candidates
by which school they went to.

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timtrueman
Your education is what _you_ make of it honestly.

~~~
biohacker42
Pithy but true.

It also implies that's not worth going into crushing debt over it.

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Zev
Yes, any college will do. But if you're going to spend 3 (run through quickly)
- 5 (take your time, explore, go abroad, etc) years somewhere, you should do
it at a place you like. You wouldn't want to work at a job you don't like for
that long. Same principle applies here.

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sanj
The WSJ should be embarrassed at its [reporter's] inability to grasp simple
stats and probability.

10% of the Fortune 500 are run by Harvard grads. Harvard's classes are about
1600/a. Just the Boston area has around 250k students. Let's assume only 160k
of them are undergrads.

Even within Boston, Harvard is over-represented by 10x!

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dimitar
How about colleges in Eastern Europe - Bulgaria in my case?

Is it worth staying in EE at all for a young person interested in technology
and engineering?

I am asking about economic possibilities, social mobility, business,
interesting projects - that kind of stuff.

~~~
ovi256
Yeah sure it is. Get your undergraduate or even your Master's in EE (it will
be amazingly cheap), then go get your PhD in North America (PhDs are paid, so
no money worries). But staying long term? Unless you become an entrepreneur
and do something like BitDefender - a product developped with local costs but
sold to a global audience, I don't think it's worth developping a career in
Eastern Europe yet. BTW, the BitDefender guys were in Bucharest, Romania.
Stopped following, so I don't know what ther're up to now. Their story sure
was an inspiration.

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jmtame
Translation: school alone is no merit to your success; you control that one.

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crsmith
The better the college, the more doors that are open to start one's career.
But it seems once college is over, and the more work experience that one has,
the less that college matters.

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globalrev
Not an expert on the area at all but it seems perhaps the college you go to is
more important for technical professions than business ones?

~~~
dgabriel
It depends on how good you are and how hard you work. The point of the article
isn't that elite colleges are bad for your career (of course not!), just that
less prestigious schools aren't necessarily bad for your career, either.

~~~
globalrev
Sure but what I mean is for engineering the difference between a good and bad
college might be bigger than say for economy?

~~~
dgabriel
I don't think so, not beyond your very first couple of jobs. I've worked with
MIT grads and college dropouts with the same title, salary, and job
expectations.

The big exception is in academia, where the college counts for a lot.

~~~
globalrev
"I don't think so, not beyond your very first couple of jobs." And how long is
that, 5-10years?

And for the really attractive jobs, do you even get a shot if straight out of
college if you are not from a top one(often you don't either how because of no
experience but when you do)?

Don't want to bash the point though. Effort > talent, I agree.

~~~
jerf
It depends on a lot of things.

In computer science, if you're trying to go into a programming career, the
difference between a prestigious college and a non-prestigious college is
significantly less than the advantage you get from having proof of coding
skill, such as significant open source work. Anyone serious about programming
should _definitely_ make sure to have something like this in hand before they
leave, if they want the good opportunities.

Of course, side project + prestigious college is a winning combo... but even
then, I'd say it's the side project dominating for most good employers.

I would imagine in fields where the means of production (whatever they may be)
are not so much in the hands of the masses that the college distinction could
be more important; how do you prove yourself a competent civil engineer with a
side project? (I dunno, maybe there's a way, but it must be a lot harder.)

~~~
nihilocrat
_Anyone serious about programming should definitely make sure to have
something like this in hand before they leave, if they want the good
opportunities._

Every college freshman should be told this repeatedly. It is too easy to miss
out on that bit of information and think that getting good grades and
graduating is enough to land you a job out of college.

