Private colleges are a waste of money for white, middle class kids

As a thought experiment, think of your own college experience. Do you really keep in touch with that many people? Of the people you do keep in touch with, can any of them open opportunities for you that are at all relevant to your field?

People who go to Harvard, Ivies, Stanford, Berkley, et al, have the same basic "College-Experience"(TM) as everyone else. No one wants to admit it, but it's not the network-effect that helps. It's the branding!

Harvard, the Ivies, et al, have brand recognition, and brand recognition helps...a lot!

If you're hiring someone, don't you think that the person with a brand that you recognize is going to at least get that person a phone-screen or an expedited interview? You're desperate to hire someone and they went to Stanford, so they must be good, right?

Ivy league degrees are simply the best door-openers out of all the door openers you can get. Once you're in the door they're as useless as the other degrees are.

2) Colleges are, however, great at identity generation. People who come from top tier schools feel and act like they are awesome. This dramatically helps when it comes to asking for a higher salary, better position, etc. I have met a number of people who didn't go to college, and a lot of them feel they need to prove that they are just as smart as college alums (which they are).

3) Colleges shouldn't be viewed as an economic investment. It is also an intellectual investment. It helps change your world view into something larger and more interesting. I benefited dramatically from reading Plato under the tutelage of Ancient Greek scholars.

4) Lastly, colleges are FUN. Colleges are filled with parties and friends. You have to include this in the costs.

Your public institution is about as stingy as it can come with it's funding. That $18,000 price tag is going to end up being your final price. If you are a good student, that private college will throw scholarships at you hand over fist. My college's price (starting at $26,000/yr) would typically get slashed by 50% at the start of each year just by the dividends off the school's endowment -- which it does not figure in to it's advertised costs since it various drastically from fiscal year to fiscal year. After that, load on a bunch of random scholarships and I would be down to around $9,000/yr. I had a couple friends whose parents took jobs at the college to get their kids a 90% discount on tuition. They actually ended up making money going to college.

Edit: I work in an education tech company and read a decent amount of literature on the subject of school selection and outcomes.

Maybe "you" can't draw any iron-clad conclusions from that observation, but I can. Debt is a multiplier. It's great when there's appreciation (ex: buying a house) but a heavy burden when there's no upside (credit cards, student loans) and an impossible crushing weight if there is depreciation (ex: buying a house that drops 20% in value).

To all current and future students: good luck out there. Learning for learning's sake is fine. But don't forget to focus on outcomes, too.

- Outside of very few jobs, this article is absolutely correct. The few jobs that it really matters are ones where they won't even look at your resume unless is has "Harvard" under "Education" on the resume for no set of reasons that have anything to do with the quality of the education. I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to if they really want to work in those kinds of places -- note: the burn-out rate on those places is usually around 2 years, then you're out in the market with the plebs and a pretentious work history you'll have to explain away for the rest of your life.

- Very early in your career, maybe the first 2-3 years, if you went to a top-tier private school you might receive a slight pay or position stats buff over your state schooled peers. If you went to a private school that wasn't top-tier nobody will recognize it and it'll be a waste of your money. Rule of thumb, if the private school you fight your way to get into and pay out the nose to attend isn't immediately name recognizable, nobody will care in the slightest early in your career and it may as well have been the local commuter school later on.

- This stats buff goes away very fast and hard as your movement up the corporate ladder start to be based on factors other than the school you went to. After your initial 2-3 years, you'll be expected to have learned the job and be able to perform at the working level. I've observed that there is almost no correlation between the best performers and the school they went to. If anything there might be a slight bias towards those that went to impersonal state schools since they're used to not having their hand held. This is the hard lesson that places like Google are learning. One of the difficult things with being data driven is that when the data shows your state school grads do as well or better than your top-tier grads in the workplace, you have to pay attention. And the data has shown conclusively that it really doesn't matter.

- By 10 years in, employers look for degree level (M.S. over B.S.) and possible field (relevant like Computer Science vs. irrelevant like Anthropology) and completely don't care what school you went to in the slightest. Those that do, 10 years in on a career, are usually places you don't want to work long-term.

- By 20 years in, you could have gone to the worst cow-poke state school in the country and nobody will care even in the slightest and your peers at that level will have educations from an impossibly diverse collection of schools.

- Many of my peers who graduated from a top-tier/private school realize that they'll need to return for an M.A./M.S. or an M.B.A. at some point in their career to maintain upward momentum. Since they're working at the same time this inevitably means going to the local state school. A comment I've heard over and over again is that state schools often don't do as much hand holding and advising (degree counseling) as the privates and they often feel lost in the impersonal grind. Many of them drop out a year in because of this. If you end up here, don't drop out, it's not that hard, but state schools won't treat you like a special snowflake.

- However, you can go to the wrong school. The big commercial for profit schools, like University of Phoenix or similar, can be a slight drag on your early career post-school and make it harder to hit career maximums. Companies like to fill up the "Leadership" page on their web site with people who went to well credentialed schools: state and private doesn't make a difference, exploitive for-profit does.

- All of my peers with huge student debts went to private schools. 20 years in, I have peers still paying $200-500/mo to service their loans. That's a car payment. The people who are debt free, and get to take on expensive hobbies, travel a lot, etc. are the ones who went to an in-state State School.

- People agonize over what school they're going to go to for their undergraduate education, usually over very minor reputation differences. By 5 years into your career it won't matter even in the slightest.

- The only people I've ever met who introduce themselves as "I'm so and so and I went to <school>" or say "When I was at <school>" instead of "when I was in college" went to an Ivy. Most people stop saying this pretentious nonsense about 10-15 years in because they'll finally clue in on the social signal that it's not impressive to anybody.

- If you have money to burn, and you want to carry cachet more than 10 years into your work, go to a well known overseas school like Oxford. You'll get name recognition, tales of the foreign, etc. However, if you have to explain that "I went to basically the Harvard of <insert country>" you won't get the same effect. Americans still think there's some secret sauce that well known top-European schools impart on a student.

- If you went to school because of the great sportsball team, nobody gives two flying fannies about it when they're hiring you. On the things that are important about you as a candidate, it's at or near the absolute bottom of the list.

- Your in-career social network will be far more meaningful for you than the one you get from school.

- Spending the extra money to go to an out-of-state state school is almost always a complete waste of money. Just go to your local state school and use the difference to pay off your loans in a couple years or buy a car or something. It makes absolutely zero difference to your employer and slight reputation differences in programs won't make that much difference once you're out in the working world.

[1]http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/private-school-no-go...

Among the top 100 offerings or so, the differences in quality of education are very small. The differences in quality of students are pretty small. But connections matter, and even if Harvard student's aren't all shockingly brilliant, the dumb ones are connected.

If you go the #147 private college and pay $50k per year, you'd be better served by a state school. If you're talking about Harvard, though... no, it's not a waste of money.

Perhaps surprisingly, the influence of pedigree increases later in one's career. These numbers are estimates, but an MIT CS grad might make $100k out of college while the state-school grad makes $85k-- not a huge difference. Ten years out, those numbers look more like $250k and $150k. Why? Connections tend to get stronger with time, even when not formally kept up. So much of the business world is run by nostalgia. That's why prep school connections are more powerful than college, and college connections are more powerful than grad-school connections... even though the elite high schools are less selective and meritocratic. Old connections suggest predestination ("born to lead") and, because of that, have a cachet that new connections (though carrying more signal) don't. The future may be (and most hope it will be) rich and abundant but the past is a scarce and eternally limited commodity; there will never be more pedigree.

Where you went to school matters not at all, ten years out, if you're in the top or bottom 10%, relative to where you might be expected to go with your training, career-wise. If you do really well, no one cares where you went to school. Or if you make terrible choices and fail catastrophically, the Harvard degree just makes it more pathetic. For that middle 80%, those connections made early on are going to start throwing "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards and that's a major asset if you want to break the ceiling and become a player.

I'd say that it generally works like this. From 22-25, pedigree matters a lot in an evaluative sense. (Make that 22-29 if you get a PhD.) From 25-30, it doesn't matter all that much because people have more recent data, when it comes to evaluation. From 30-40, it starts to matter again, not because people judge you based on it-- your record speaks for itself-- but because you're vying for leadership or coveted creative/architectural roles and that means politics, and you need "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards (which come from having connections) for when your risks blow up. After 40, it seems to stop mattering because that's an age at which you shouldn't need "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards at all.