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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

My issue is it seems to be you have to dedicate your childhood to getting into a top 10 college.

I have teenage children who are looking at starting high school. I've been looking at Youtube videos reading books etc. It seems the only way is if you get straight As, start charities, get national awards, write amazing essays and have "significant impact" in your community with leadership positions. No normal 14 year old naturally does this, realistically it seems you can only get anywhere if you hire a coach to help you do all those right things.

I also actually hire a lot of graduates and most of them are great but many from the top schools are just burnt out and really dont want to work any more - if they did all that stuff I'm not surprised.

System seems screwed up.

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> My issue is it seems to be you have to dedicate your childhood to getting into a top 10 college

Top 10 colleges are a completely different game. Nobody needs to go to a top 10 university.

It’s a game for the most competitive to play. It’s not equivalent to higher education in general.

Outside of global top 50, ROI decreases to the point where you start considering where it is actually worth it. That was at least my thought process back in the days when I was applying to universities.

Care to quantify this?

Where I'm from, a 4 year stint in higher education is about as expensive as a month's wages. It gets more expensive if you need student housing, but many students can and do commute.

Most young folks can study something that interests them, at little risk. No one here has to worry about the ROI of their offspring's studies, nor do they have to worry about their prepubescent child starting charities (or whatever other insane nonsense) in order to qualify for some insanely expensive elitist college.

Seems like a much more sensible approach than putting a fuckton of pressure on kids in order to get them in a college which will land them with 30 years of debt on top of a potential degree.

Let kids be kids, and give students a chance to learn and explore.

I completely agree! I should've worded my comment a bit better - "should I pay $40k/year for a school that won't open up doors for me in the future?" was the question that I was trying to answer back in the days. If it's cheap, or you can go without going into debt, obviously the calculations would be different.

I agree with this attitude as it was in the country I grew up in. However in the US often internships are the path to graduate jobs which is a much easier way into the highest paying jobs. The other thing is time, sure you can try something out for 4 years but doing too much education means you'll never get to settle down until your 30s at the earliest.

> Outside of global top 50, ROI decreases

Source? Costs decrease, too.

that’s debatable. depends on the school and the major that’s being studied.

There are MANY underrated good state schools that are nowhere near top 50, but can still offer a great education.

Unless your only measure of success is getting your foot into the workplace due to prestige.

> Unless your only measure of success is getting your foot into the workplace due to prestige.

Prestige I'm not so worried about the but getting foot into the workplace is a significant benefit.

I understand what you mean. Everyone’s path is different though. I went to an affordable state school around 2010 and my first job in the workplace was not glamorous.

It was a big manufacturing company that happened to have a small software division lol. I earned $60k in a HCOL state but that’s OK. You learn quickly when you’re a junior, and if you job hop a few times, it’s easy to land at a respectable software company after 4-5 years.

I now work at an employer that is a household name, and hires new grad computer science students from stanford, MIT, etc. Those new grads are a little smarter than me, but we still work at the same place. It’s OK…i’m not complaining. :)

I dont know man, my school is not a global top 50 but it was a public engineering school and the CS degree I got was extremely valuable. I think you are being too strict with that "global top 50". It depends more on are you learning a skillset that an employer can find useful?

The same credential game in the top 10 trickles down unfortunately

I don't doubt that the effort required is immense.

But, you're talking about a collection of institutions that receive tens of thousands of applications every year. Just by pure numbers, it's clear that only a small percentage can attend.

And the fact that only a few can attend feeds their air of exclusivity, which makes their attendees stand out in the job market, which then causes more people to want to attend those schools.

I don't know if there's a way to solve this except by forcing people to stop caring about what school a job applicant went to. Which is kind of starting to happen but, in many industries like law and business it's still the norm.

Societal problem, really.

It's harder to find someone in an elite university who completely lacks the technical ability to do their job. Of course they still exist.

But the advantage of hiring from one of those schools ends there. For every "top 10 university" student there are 10 more capable ones from another school, you just have to work a tiny bit harder to find them.

So ultimately it's lazy hiring.

If you go to grad school nobody cares where you went to undergrad but they care a lot about research experience getting into grad school, and it’s easier to actually get research experience at a state school where the other students aren’t all also trying to get it. Most state schools guarantee admission to people with an in state AA degree.

I went this route, and am now a tenured PI at one of the most prestigious places in the world. I had several highly cited first author pubs in good journals as an undergrad at a state school. I was also paid to do that research, which made college almost free. I’m not going to put any pressure on my kid to “prepare for college” because it simply isn’t necessary and just makes you miss out on being a teenager.

The sad truth is parents think putting massive pressure on their kids will make them smarter, or more skilled at things that lead to a high paying or prestigious career. Unfortunately that’s not true… if they have the aptitude to succeed they will do so without the pressure. If the pressure makes the difference, it means a miserable life doing something they don’t really like and aren’t very good at but were forced into by their parents.

Thanks for this. I think the same but I never went to grad school so I'm wary it might be the last step instead of the penultimate one. Its hard to get out of the Ivy mania as well.

Setting a goal of getting into a "top 10 college" (whatever that means) is pointless. The admission rates are so low that even for students who check all the boxes it's still a lottery ticket. And there's not much difference in average lifetime earnings between graduates of those schools versus the next tier down.

Which is particularly crazy because there isn't very much of an earnings premium for going to a top 10 college vs a "rest of the world" college. The big gap is between high school grads and college grads, not between graduates of more or less prestigious colleges.

Realistically, most people are average. One of the biggest changes I've seen since my childhood is that everyone seems to think they can be a rockstar at something. Obviously only a few people get to do that. I think there's been a distortion in life expectations.

How much do people care that you went to a top 10 college?

I'm sure it depends on your field: in mine (academic science, which is as plagued by name-dropping and elitism as any) the thing that matters is the last thing you did.

Of course the whole thing is a trajectory. If your goal is to climb the ivory tower (it probably shouldn't be but anyway...) you need to be lucky or rich at some point. But if it doesn't happen at at undergraduate admissions you just have to do actual work, and then get lucky at some later point. So yes, it's screwed up. But that's not my question.

What I want to know: how often are people getting hired based on their undergraduate institution beyond their first job out of collage. Is this a thing? In what field?

Nobody cares where I went to college. But I cared.

I think it's possible to find a path through most universities that will produce a first class education. Take the most challenging classes available.

I'm the opposite. I went to the literal closest college for what I wanted that happen to be a top 10. Even over a decade later people care. They mention it to me. I have a suspiciously easier time getting callbacks in economic downturns.

I won't make my kid kill themselves to get into a top 10, but only people who haven't gotten the glow of a top university think it doesn't matter.

Anecdotally, I’ve definitely seen a high correlation between schools I’ve heard of and those I haven’t. Schools don’t need to be top 10, but top 100 seems to help a lot. And this is for programming jobs.

So education marketing?

It seems to matter to those deciding where to put their early-stage venture capital. Granted, that's not why most people are going to college, but it's too simple to say that it isn't used as signal.

16-21 is a super hard age. I have no idea what affect that kind of credentialism will have, maybe it just ends up delaying the growing pains that take place. Which might not be a good thing because high school and college are more forgiving than what comes after

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