Do Elite Colleges Lead to Higher Salaries? Only for Some Professions
wsj.com
wsj.com
1) It puts you in a network of other people who went to the institution, oftentimes people who have connections that can help you in life
2) It gives you a piece of paper that shows you can follow a long term plan and execute on it, that other people recognize as a difficult long term plan to execute.
3) Gives you an icebreaker when going to interviews where you can talk about either how you and the interviewer went to the same institution, or rival institutions, or you can talk about how your elite institution was different from theirs and the same.
What you don't get is a "better education". (Edit: Some have pointed out rightly that I should differentiate here between top non-elite instututions and the ones that are diploma mills, so to be clear, what I'm saying doesn't apply to the diploma mills.) You do the same work as the folks at the less elite institutions. Maybe you do it with slightly smarter people who help you learn new things that you wouldn't otherwise, but most of the "less elite" schools still use the same textbooks and materials. And heck maybe your professor wrote the book so you can get more detailed answers, but it's unlikely that that access gives you a significant leg up unless you take advantage of it.
So it makes sense that in fields where skills matter, the elite college doesn't add a lot of benefit, but where connections matter, it does.
Is this true? When I look at some of the prestigious universities that have some of their coursework online, some of the courses appear more rigorous and challenging than the large state school I went to. Perhaps this challenge does not amount to better education, but it certainly seems more challenging.
It's quite rare for a course anywhere to get through all of the textbook - regardless of where you go, there will still be material left unlearned. (This is why one of my favorite learning strategies is to buy the textbook and then self-teach my way through it at my own pace.)
It's quite hard to get a sense for what a course is truly like just from glancing at the syllabus.
What matters even more though is the student body. Hanging out with a bunch of really smart and dedicated young people for 4+ years gives one a huge leg up intellectually.
At my small school there were very few smart people to talk to, it was very lonely and insular. By comparison, time I spent hanging out around Berkeley and PENN were very exciting intellectually.
At the state school, if you were really, really good at your coursework or were taking advanced classes earlier than normal, you stood out so much that there was actually a sense of isolation. It made me feel fairly uncomfortable in a few cases, which is one of the things that led me to transfer away.
Also, UCB outranks most of the ivyleague in the sciences, engineering and computer science on most measures --
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni...
http://www.shanghairanking.com/FieldSCI2015.html
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/ran...
I can't say I know for sure but I imagine if this were MIT or Caltech, the students would not be complaining and instead study harder to make sure they could keep up. On the other hand, they probably wouldn't have trouble keeping up.
I didn't go to a top 10 school but a top 15 CS program for what it's worth.
Presumably the tutors discuss this, and if everyone is having trouble it's raised with the lecturer. I think it happened once, and a couple if extra lectures / whole class tutorials were set.
Comparing elite schools to flagship state public schools this essential true. But there are a lot of diploma mills that water down the curriculum so people who have no business being in college can pass.
Whether a better education will actually make you a better worker or person, I'm not sure sure about that.
Then again, I was a math major, and I've traditionally believed that math is one of the subjects where the school can make the biggest difference. There's a cultural aspect to math where being surrounded by a ton of extremely passionate and talented mathematicians is just impossibly valuable. At Mizzou, even the math majors didn't seem to care. I stood out like a sore thumb just for being truly passionate about the subject.
Though I disagree with the "better education" part. There were some courses that were unique only to Georgia Tech or taught by professors who were well known in their field.
Amazingly the Georgia Tech degree did not prevent a layoff
Partial layoffs (20% of your job "family") are usually about the employee. Wholesale layoffs (all of a job type, all of a product team, all of a location) are generally completely independent of the specific employee, skills, capabilities, or performance.
In my experience, it is more nuanced than even that. Just take computer science. There are schools that teach languages. You'll spend a semester with C, then a semester with C++, then one with Java. And then there are colleges that teach concepts. Let's look at memory management (and pointers), then let's look at data structures, then let's look at networks. Personally, the latter seem to be a far better education even if the overall experience leads to less initial skill at any given language.
Or take a look even with the same college between degrees. Some science tracks requires statistics for business majors where they will spend a day learning how to sum numbers. Other science tracks require statistics for science and engineering, where multi-variable calculus is a prerequisite. Now imagine if the degree requiring the simplified statistics was switched to requiring the harder version.
(All this being said, I agree connections are a bigger deal. I think what you learn does differ between colleges, but at the end of the day it isn't what you know but who you know.)
I attended undergrad at a big state school. My classmates were largely representative of the top 30% of my high school - people who are either gifted with raw intelligence, or who do well by working hard. My school had good sports teams, and the student body spent a lot of time and effort cheering for the teams, partying, and generally having a good time. I certainly enjoyed myself, though the academic standards were so lax that I was able to pass an entire semester where I attended no classes other than the exams. There are a lot of people who just aren't interested in the academic side of school.
Some years later, I went to a much more prestigious school for my MBA. This school didn't really have an athletic department (as a Division III school they were not allowed to issue athletic scholarships) and the student body as a whole was both smart and hard-working. I mean, sure, they drank their share too -- but learning was considered cool and group projects (while drinking, of course!) were a perfectly acceptable way to spend a Friday or Saturday night.
That attitude is infectious and it sticks with you. Once there is positive peer pressure to learn, suddenly everyone becomes invested in everyone else's success. You go from "I heard that class was an easy A so I'm gonna take it" to "I think that class looks really interesting. Want to take it with me?" Extrapolate that from school to life and you start to see why graduates of these elite schools on the whole tend to be more successful.
And yet what this research and other studies like it are showing is that, for STEM majors, the kind of people you are talking about are equally successful regardless of where they go to school. The school itself doesn't add anything to their success; it's just that those who are going to be more successful anyway, regardless of school, are better at getting into harder-to-get-into schools.
And as for the connections, these comments keep talking about how the better schools give you better connections. If so, this research showing no mid-career earnings advantage suggests that if those "better" connections are worth anything at all, it isn't money or things that show up as more money such as better jobs, more access to jobs, more job stability, etc. My interpretation, though, and my own experience, is that the connections ARE worth money, but that birds of a feather soon flock together after graduation, regardless of where they went to school. Stanford and MIT engineers don't go to the same school, and if you have as much in common with them out in the working world as they have with each other, you will soon have similar connections and similar lives.
Make the wrong assumption that this article illustrates. I think the only difference you really observed was between undergrad and grad school and had little to do with the prestige of the school.
Contrast with the undergrads at my grad school (I did a bunch of hackathons and pitch competitions with the undergrads, so I worked with quite a few of them), nearly all of whom were the smartest kid in their high school. Some were pricks, some were more humble, but god damn, every single one of those kids was ambitious.
I'm at a community college right now, doing gen-eds, and I absolutely dread all group work because the vast majority of my classmates are a) completely unprepared for the class or b) completely indifferent to actually working. Some of it is immaturity, but a lot of it is the fact that kids at a community college tend to be lower-caliber students. There are some who are doing the exact same thing as me - saving money, saving the commute - but they're outnumbered by the "Welp, I couldn't get into Yale, but Mommy and Daddy want me to go to college, so here I am."
As a result, I'm a try-hard in classes that I'm paying for. I mostly grin and bear it, as I'm saving several thousand dollars per year by taking gen-eds at the CC, but there are times that I think, "You know, if I were in class with people who actually gave a shit, I'd probably get more out of it."
It's unfortunate, as discussions are not nearly as engaging as they could be.
In Australia we have a clear distinction between Universities, which typically teach the underlying theories and ideas of things like engineering, biochem, etc (the why) and TAFE (Technical and Further Education), which typically teach how to do stuff like welding and being a lab technician (the doing).
It's vary rare that a graduating mechanical engineer can weld, for example, because the University doesn't teach them that.
I personally think programming falls into the category of doing (like welding), but in this case it's difficult to teach the why of computer theory without having done some programming, but it's perfectly easy to teach the physics and math of building a bridge without ever having used a welder.
Good programming skills are not necessary to teach CS, but that does not imply that teaching CS is a sufficient condition for having bad programming skills. (Propositional Logic 101, taught by someone who may or may not be good at programming).
Funnily enough, the software engineers from my university (U of Auckland) are all taught how to weld, because all engineering students are (were?) sent to the technical college across the road for a short machine-shop course.
I'd say it was useful for the mechanical engineers and related disciplines, maybe civil engineering, but for most of us it was a bit of a non sequitur (though interesting to some.)
I've always found that my degree got my foot in the door, after that it was my research experience, internships and performance in interviews/code tests.
I went to a top-25 non-ivy.
In that case, college's apologists would still give the same rationalizations about "Pokemon dynamics teach you how to learn, and give you a broader view of the world, and the Pokemon evolution system helps you better structure your thoughts for clear communication, which is obviously why it improves your earnings and is a must-have for being a well-rounded individual who doesn't just fix toilets all day".
My wife started her degree at a community college. They had pretty decent humanities courses, kind of lousy biology courses, and downright embarrassing (or really non-existant) computer science ones. She transferred for the rest of her degree to a reasonably well known, selective, but not `elite` school (was accepted at an ivy but we turned it down due to not feeling the cost was worth it). Both the humanities courses and bio courses there were excellent. The CS courses (with the exception of one class/professor) were not great. Like in the professors teaching things that were wrong sense. =\
I attended a top 10 school and classes in every field I took were well done. Better than the Hum/Bio stuff at my wife's second school? No, not really. But I didn't experience anything anywhere near as bad as her CS classes.
The community college (and to a lesser extent the mid tier school) had a lot of issues with administration. At the CC you'd have to physically wait in hour long lines for basically anything (picking up IDs, seeing your advisor, fixing class registration issues, etc). The "quiet study area" signs were completely ignored. The mid tier school was much better, still, there were issues with getting into the right classes necessary to finish majors and minors as there simply weren't enough spots in the higher level classes. There was a stressful song and dance the first week of each term trying to get off of waitlists and into classes.
The elite school I attended had an absurd 3:1 student/faculty ratio. The only class I ever had trouble getting into was one video games that the entire school must have registered for. I could usually walk into my professor and advisor's offices without appointments. Does this make the education "better"? Eehhh not really, but it was way less stressful and I had more time and energy to devote to learning stuff and less to dealing with understaffed bureaucracy.
Finally, the elite school had a whole lot more instructors who were well known or well connected in their fields, won Nobel prizes, etc. We got many more famous and influential guest speakers. I learned C++ from a member of the C++ standardization committee. Networking from someone who worked on ARPANET. Professors that I had classes with were referenced in popular scifi tv shows. My wife jealously (but playfully) pokes me at least weekly pointing out yet another book or paper she's been asked to read in one of her classes authored by researchers from my school or they've been mentioned in a textbook as having discovered something particularly important about her field. Does this make an education "better" or worth the price of admission? I'm not entirely convinced on that, but I think I do have a better understanding of some of the inner workings of my field because of some of the stories and asides made by instructors who were there for it.
That's not to be undervalued:
Based on years of experience I would estimate that the "good" jobs, often regardless of the field, are landed as follows:
Networking (60% of my "gigs":) Nepotism (10%, maybe more, much less in my case) Proven Ability to Deliver (20%) Good Luck (10%)
Having said that, I believe it's very possible to leverage network contacts from a smaller school, especially if you're a member of on-campus groups that have a nation-wide presence...
This is the main (and probably the only legitimate) reason to want to be educated in such an institution. They can provide an access to an early research material which is not even published yet, and will only get into textbooks decades later.
When investors came visiting they would be introduced "this is Mike from MIT" where other people who were at least as qualified as the ivy leaguers would get ignored. The VCs seemed impressed. They didn't even need a network. The name of the school was enough to stand out.
Result is that the Stanford and MIT guys would often start their own VC funded companies.
Elite institutions are a very powerful brand. And their reputation gets amplified in the media with headlines "Yale researchers discover...", "MIT develops..."
MIT and a few others are frequently confused as being members because of proximity and their own prestigious histories.
Not a huge fan of the US News rankings, but here is the list for top undergraduate engineering programs (at doctoral granting institutions)
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...
There is only one ivy, Cornell, in the top 10 (though Princeton does clock in at 11). Like I said, I'm not a huge fan of these rakings, and using them to the digit (4th place vs 6th place) is genuinely absurd. But overall, you'll see here that large public research universities, none of which crack the top 20 for US News undergraduate college rankings, are much more prominent where it comes to engineering.
There are reasons in the methodology for this as well - I think that the algorithm used to create the general rankings isn't similar to this one, which (like the ranking for grad programs) is more academic and research focused (not considering average SAT, admission rates, funding, and so forth).
But overall, the Ivies actually aren't highly notable where it comes to computer science and engineering. Large public research universities, as well as elite non-ivy privates, tend to predominate here.
This does make a certain amount of sense. If a STEM major is an "equalizer", where smart people who went to less prestigious schools can compete on (more) equal footing, it would make sense that students at highly selective undergraduate programs might eschew engineering or CS in favor of fields where their undergrad school might provide a stronger differentiator. And, conversely, if a super smart undergrad at San Jose state will have trouble overcoming the pedigree disadvantage in international relations, but can get a more equal crack through engineering, it would make more sense to study STEM.
I'm definitely guilty of some "just-so" reasoning here, but it does fit.
I went to MIT and that's about the least impressive and least relevant thing I can think of to what I did/do for the company I work for. Yet, in investor/VC/pitch/roadshow decks, I usually see "this is how many MIT and how many Stanford grads we have"...
Trust me, it's not nearly as relevant as people think, but it must work.
VCs are risk-averse pattern matchers. Their training patterns include knowing that startups with a high percentage of MIT and Stanford grads do well. Despite the fact that correlation isn't causation, they live off of that fallacy, so they would rather invest in a bunch of MIT and Stanford grads than not.
It actually makes a lot of sense for a VC to do that. They have a huge incentive to have a lot of false negatives and avoid false positives, so it's much better for them to use criteria that will eliminate good companies than allow bad ones.
It's called MUST.[1]
[1] Well, all right, they prefer the term "Missouri S&T," which abbreviates "Missouri University of Science and Technology." Oddly, the Institute of Technology, one division of the University of Minnesota, is no longer called that, because in this part of the Midwest, "Institute of Technology" sounded too much like a for-profit vocational school, so now the same unit of Minnesota is called the College of Science and Engineering, or C.S.E. for short. When I heard about the name change proposal, I thought, "Hasn't anyone heard of the California Institute of Technology [now Caltech is the preferred name] or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [which is usually called MIT by anyone who knows of it]?"
That makes certain professions unreachable from outside of a few colleges, like some top law firms, consultancy, banks, or even tech companies!
It sounds like you are concentrating on the classroom experience, but there is more to a good education than the classroom.
For instance, at schools like Caltech and MIT undergraduates have excellent opportunities to get involved with research, and have access to state of the art equipment. Such opportunities are a lot more limited at, say, a Cal State branch.
Good programmers from elite schools are in high demand and can ask for relatively high salaries. When I have been working in companies with big budgets, I can get good programmers from elite schools. When I have been working in companies with smaller budgets, I can't.
However, as you infer, I don't find a big difference in the quality of new graduates based on the school that they went to. Overall they seem to have a very similar gradient of ability. The schools can differ on what they concentrate on, but I have found that good quality programmers suck up everything around them anyway. Whatever they missed at school they have either independently worked on, or are keen to learn after school.
From a hiring point of view, I actually target people from lesser known schools simply because there seems to be a higher percentage of good people available. Obviously from a getting hired perspective, you will have a greater chance of working on a team with a big budget right out of school if you go to an elite school.
One thing I learned when I worked as a teacher: good students need very little in the way of instruction. Point them in a direction and give them freedom to learn. That will give you the best results. In fact I have been fortunate to work with several really marvellous programmers who were self-taught (though I don't recommend that approach for most people -- it's hard to focus and to know what is best to concentrate on).
From my perspective, an elite school is ideal if you are hoping to make contacts and to go to a big famous company right out of school. If your goal is to learn, then you can save a HUGE amount of money by choosing a less prestigious school. I graduated with no debt (admittedly I worked programming for various professors all through school). It takes a pretty big difference in starting salary to offset that kind of advantage.
Still, the cost of any college is absolutely stifling unless you're willing to take on a lot of debt or have parents willing to support you - unless you have absolutely top grades. Too many very intelligent people I know growing up had social or parental problems - passed all their tests but couldn't do the homework due to trouble at home.
I think the major downside to skipping school is that it makes it nearly impossible to immigrate to another country sometime in your life. A degree in a related field is worth its weight in gold in that case.
I attended Caltech. In my later work experience, I clearly received a more thorough education than my peers who went to other colleges, particularly in math. And yes, it did give me a leg up.
It's not just diploma mills (unless every uni outside of the top ~10 is a diploma mill for you). In my opinion you are completely wrong. Quoting myself from a similar thread:
> I'm at a mediocre university and watching MIT lectures has made me realize I'm missing out on literally mountains of knowledge. Never mind the qualification process, spending several years with intelligent people (both students and faculty) [also] makes a huge difference.
The caveat is that you at some point need to build personal relationships with these folks. Success in the network might be a minor influence at baseline ("ah, from my old alma mater, sure I'll take the interview...") but those choice positions come from friends offering friends' friends jobs.
To boot, I think this can be true even in skill-driven fields -- unless you're intended to be a pure engineer, money comes from managing people & projects (i.e. the more work you can generate for other people, the more valuable you are). These positions requires far less technical chops than we'd maybe like.
You could turn this into a different question - is the value of an elite college that it allows you to major in something other than STEM? And maybe one step further - if elite colleges differentiate themselves from other colleges through the prospects they offer non-STEM students, does that mean it may be rational for very elite students to avoid STEM, which serves as an equalizer?
I have noticed this anecdotally by observing the prospects of strong students who went to good but not elite schools. You could be a very strong international relations student from a mid-tier UC (say, UC Davis or UCSD), but your prospects really won't be as good as they would be if you'd gone to Yale. It isn't game over, but Yale is a huge boost. But if you major in CS, they will be the same…
… or will they? There certainly is still a difference in kind, just not one that is as readily apparent to people who see a bunch of squiggles, symbols, and text flashing by on a screen. There is an easily observed difference between being a the director of the American Music Heritage foundation (an invented title and organization) at $130k a year and a senior crud bug fixer for $130k a year. But these differences exist within tech as well. An interesting data science position where you have a lot of autonomy is a very different life from checking in with the scrum team every morning to talk about whether you've figured out why the config file changes are making the computer say "ERRNO 63: gcc header updater missing", even if they both pay the same.
Do elite colleges lead to a hidden difference in kind within the tech field, similar to what is observable outside of tech?
In our industry there are many people who do just fine with no CS degree, CS degree from obscure schools, or degree at all. Almost no other industry can say that. However, in general, elite school means better opportunities, better classmates that motivate you, better companies recruiting, etc. The difference exists, it's just "smaller" and evens out with time.
Remember that in our industry you can move to $100k+ after 3-5 years of experience (of course, if you put in work, network and get better, but the demand for "mid/senior" devs is big). I've found that your background rarely matters at that point.
That said, I'm not sure you're responding to my question, which is whether there is a hidden difference in kind rather than in salary. For instance, your background may not matter if you're moving up to what I cynically describe as "mid/senior crud big fixer", and it may be that those jobs pay as well as "mid/senior data scientist" who works in an R&Dish role without looking deadlines or scrum tickets. Even if both earn the same salary, I consider one role to be much more desirable than the other (though I actually do kind of enjoy chasing down bugs sometimes).
Does the MIT grad have a better crack at the more interesting, R&Dish job with greater autonomy, less micromanagement, fewer deadlines? It's a question, not a conclusion (I suspect it's true, but I acknowledge that I don't have the data to support it). If so, I wouldn't say background rarely matters - it does matter, but it won't show up in the numbers if all you're looking at is salary.
That's not to say that attending a prestigious university should, in and of itself, guarantee a higher salary. But there are so many positively correlated, salary-increasing traits with attending an elite university, that this article does not pass the smell test.
> For STEM-related majors, average earnings don’t vary much among the college categories.
Perhaps average or media earnings are not affected much, but what about the outliers?
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg went to Harvard. Stanford had Larry Page, Sergey Brin, William Hewlett, David Packard, Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Andy Bechtolsheim and others.
One thing is good state schools have good people coming out of them as well - Bill Joy and Eric Schmidt went to UC Berkeley, Max Levchin and Marc Andreessen went to UIUC. There are some good state schools you see a number of successful tech people coming out of, they're not all expensive private schools. They all have a good reputatiion though, whether public or private.
And, looking at the actual data collected, the image on the right doesn't hold up. The study must have collected data from hundreds of colleges, yet there were only 7,300 observations. Sounds like a lot, but assuming that there were 200 universities (probably a low estimate) and 8 categories of majors, you're only looking at 4 to 5 observations per college per category. And these observations were probably unevenly distributed. So it's inevitable that a few colleges will have extreme "median" reported incomes, as the table on the right shows the highest incomes observed in each field.
So while the percentile distinctions cited in the article between selective and less-selective schools are likely accurate, the numbers on the image of the right-hand side - the really striking part of the article - have almost no statistical validity.
The WSJ is leading people to a shocking conclusion even though the real finding - that there's a 12%-18% difference in earnings between selective and less-selective colleges - is much less extreme. (It's also likely making a lot of people feel poor... one of the strange selling points of the WSJ that in this case simultaneously gets eyeballs on PayScale.com)
Only ~30% of the population gets a college degree, and a college degree has a large impact on income. Add that these are good schools and that most students in good schools come from wealth, with all the other benefits that entails, and I don't find those numbers surprising.
I went to a New England liberal arts college, like Colgate, and the most popular major at my school was Economics, which is categorized as Social Science. Most of the Econ graduates went for jobs in management consulting or investment banking, as those companies would come to recruit on campus, and tend to already have a solid number of alums working there to begin with. In fact, Dick Fuld, the ex-CEO of the infamous Lehman Brothers investment bank, was a trustee on the board of my school, and hired many alums, as did Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, etc.
For banking jobs straight out of undergrad, you don't have to have a deep understanding of quantitative finance. It's more about having a soiid GPA, a demonstrated interest in the topic and interest in learning, and the capacity to work very, very long hours.
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/School=Colgate_Universit...
In addition, only 25% of Colgate grads go into business-related fields after graduation and the number of those going into high-profile management consulting or investment banking is likely under 100 people a year. The number of people making huge piles of money in general is very small and isn't as correlated with education as people tend to think. Hacker News has a wildly skewed view of this and dishonest "statistics" like these generally go unexamined.
It seems almost ridiculous that a 17 year needs to make decisions that even someone with a Phd with economics won't be able make.
I wish both kids and parents spent more time actually figuring out how to optimize learning rather than spend their energy thinking about nonsense - its almost like a gambling addiction ?
I remember when I was in school I used to watch students spend a year writing college essays, preparing for SATs, shelling out insane amount of money for tutors, etc.
Meanwhile I just concentrated on mathematics and programming to actually make myself valuable to society.
Most people will be surprised when they realize how far they can get with books.
Books are not as efficient as learning directly from Newton - but they are 1/1000 the cost.
I know the economy would collapse tomorrow if everyone just stopped going to school and spent their evening reading books but humanity has bigger problems to solve then the economy.
Also, I never said anything about having things "gifted", and I'm not sure how what I said gives that impression. In fact, I was specifically complaining that common college prep for high school students does not tell them about these tangential things they should be doing at the next level.
This is what already happens in (at least part of) the technical certificate industry: people pay to make tests and get certified. This seems like a more intelligent approach.
Any certification process for a non-trivial field is necessarily a sampling process. If you allow students to bypass the education part and they just have to pass the sampling test to gain some valuable credential, I think you'll find an industry springing up to shortcut the education process in favor of the "just barely passing the test" process.
In other words, I believe you are right when you point that the educational institutes would narrow their focus to cover only the necessary bits to get certified, but I don't see this getting much far from what we have already; and from the point of view of the certificate emitting institute, it is desirable for the top ones to not emit certificates to anyone (in order to build a valuable brand name), having them to focus on elaborating challenging tests. Of course there may be "certificate mills", but again, this already happens, just with less flexibility.
What really picks me is that, at the end, it is all about the value people give to these certificates. Nothing would prevent society (including employers) to value more the educational process than the testing one; nothing would prevent the educational institutes to also emit certificates, thus coming back to where we are; but employers should not rely purely on certificates anyway, then I believe there is hope for the overall proposed model.
Now, decouple the exam part and have someone else issue the same exact exam as the MIT profs give, but without requiring the lecture or p-set component. Now, I can imagine there would be a profitable industry player, call them the "Minimum Instructions for the Test", who might teach you only the three laws, enough math to work out a Carnot cycle problem, and the background for one energy balance problem, in other words, just enough to pass the certification exam.
The students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology will have passed the same test as the students from Minimum Instructions for the Test and yet I can have confidence in the former's ability to solve a basic on-the-job thermodynamics problem and not in the latter.
IOW, I think it is, in effect, creating a new problem by eliminating the lecture, office hours, section meetings, and problem sets aspect of the education process and focusing only on the final exam aspect. I'm really not trying to erect and eviscerate a strawman here; apologies if it seems that way, but I'm trying in this post to be very concrete about the problem I see with test-only certifications.
I still think that the tests, if elaborated by entities fully dedicated to them, could grow to be way more advanced than they are today. But even in the case where this growth does not happen, having separate entities dedicated to perform test-only certification could be beneficial.
By the way, if you still read this: suppose you have student A and student B. Student A attended to all classes, did exercises etc. but failed the tests. Student B missed all classes, but passed every test. Do you think student A should be certified? What about student B? Who would you hire?
Whether student B should be depends on the quality and thoroughness of the test, but assuming that is high, then yes.
Whether I'd hire student B, who has shown a propensity to not show up to classes, depends on why they missed them and whether I think that represents a risk in the work-world. Having someone who can pass the test but can't bother to show up to work doesn't help me very much either... ;)
I don't know if that's my personality or my past that's doing that though, perhaps if I went to a prestigious school I would be the same way and would be much more successful.
1. People will prejudge in your favor, the more average the individual the more they will do this. This is a very strong effect, and the primary benefit. I don't mean this in a cynical way. It's a great thing if you can get it.
2. Your classmates in school will be smarter and think bigger, which has a significant motivational effect. A larger percentage will go on to have significant achievements. Most of your classmates at an elite school will eventually accomplish nothing, just like a state school.
3. Prestige-oriented institutions will favor you heavily, for example banks, law firms, and consultancies. They really do need people with great social skills and a strong work ethic, which is the same filter that elite schools use.
I'm on vacation right now, lack the time to add references.
But it is pretty damn close. UW currently clocks in at number 52 [1].
[1] http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
Pros for the more prestigious school:
1- A well-known school will mean that you're more likely to get an interview and an offer fresh out of college, everything else being equal. There are smart people in less-known schools, but there are more that skate by also. A good student that went to an average school could still find a great job, but would need to try harder (and face more rejection) to do so.
2- A well-known school will mean you will have a better network of students, and probably be more likely to start personal and group projects that will look good when you start the job hunt.
3- More research opportunities. Important if you plan on going to grad school.
Pros of the less prestigious school:
1- Way less money. I can't imagine that going to a great school without a ton of help from scholarships and grants would even be remotely worth it.
2- Smaller class sizes. I could go to my professors whenever, and they knew me quite well even though I almost never went to see them. The entire department was on one floor of a fairly small building. You don't have to work to get your name known or get help.
I'm sure that a prestigious college has better students and a better network, but the education given by the institution may not be that different. The tuition difference is huge, and I would guess that differences between two talented students with different educations would disappear after a few years in industry. If I did it again, I would probably go to a different school, but not one that was much more in tuition. Although I don't think my education held me back. I probably would have had a few more interviews and maybe one more offer (that I did interview for) with a different school on my resume.
2. if you go into a field with a low variance in pay (say teaching) an elite degree may not make you more money, but it may dramatically increase you likelihood of landing a job, or getting a more desirable job despite similar (or lower pay) i.e. at a public vs. private school
Then, later, without revisiting this term, they say, "What we found startled us. For STEM-related majors ..."
I wonder whether these writers actually think that's how "STEM" is commonly defined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_Technology,_Engineeri...
I read about how the biggest advantage to elite colleges is networking as opposed to the actual education, but then the network itself is really significant, like having investment firms as alumni as opposed to DevShop founders.
Is there a way for a student who isn't at an elite college to mimic the elite like network?
I went to school with: a DA, guy who owns an engineering firm, a big Union lobbyist, bunch of social workers, a deputy commissioner of a large government agency, regional bank vp and a few other things.
Not Steve Jobs, but good contacts with a good network. You can make lemonade there.
I think there are other complicating factors: if you go to school in a high paying area and end up staying in the area, then you get higher pay no matter the school.
That may be problematic as a plan, if (as I've heard is the case) elite graduate programs are somewhat biased in admissions to elite undergraduate programs.
> Seems like a better cost/benefit ratio, considering Masters is only 1 or 2 years and thus doesn't cost as much.
Graduate programs tend to, at similar schools, have a substantially higher cost per year (though may also offer more opportunities to offset that cost) than undergraduate programs; a masters, despite less time in residence, can easily cost more after the bachelors than a bachelors at the same university would cost.
Not even Ivy League can prepare you for white board interviews.
;)
I should make it clear im talking about jobs that pay 300k+. Below that and it isnt a highly selective enough for top pedigree to be such a huge deal.
> For STEM-related majors, average earnings don’t vary much among the college categories. For example, we find no statistically significant differences in average earnings for science majors between selective schools and either midtier or less-selective schools. Likewise, there’s no significant earnings difference between engineering graduates from selective and less-selective colleges, and only a marginally significant difference between selective and midtier colleges.
It's just below MIT/CMU/Stanford/Berkley. Typically just as well regarded as UW/Cornell/Princeton/UIUC/Georgia Tech/Caltech.
Dijkstra used to be the department chair in the 80s and early 90s.
OK, very few people are smarter than an average (but not the best) ivy league students, without having that exceptionally good training places like MIT or Yale offer, but these people are outsiders, marginalized by modern practices and social institutions.
They end up making good sandwiches, like that character from Atlas Shrugged, because they habitually striving for an optimum, no matter what they are doing.
In the field of OSS we have a few well-known names - recall a project with uncommonly good theoretical understanding and exceptional attention to details and you will find one (LuaJIT, nginx, redis, OpenBSD, good parts of Haskell base libraries, etc, etc).
All I am trying to say is that elite colleges phenomena is a social construction that works for society which believe in it. One has to conform if one wishes to be a part of such a society.
Less traveled pathways are much harder and usually are leading to unexpected and yet unknown.
A much better way to measure the quality is by a number of papers published in top journals (by the alumni, no the university itself), number of Nobel prizes won, etc.
Universities must produce academics (i.e., salary is supposed to suck anyway).