Does attending a more selective college equal a bigger paycheck?

[CYdTracked]

Agree with what you say except necessarily the part about a year to two at a CC. Every person that I know that has attended a CC full time either took four years (ones who had a semester or two done already) or 4.5-5 years (those with very little while entering) due not being able to take anything truly in their major and having to test the waters when they finally get to the main school. A year maybe, but I could not recommend taking two years of full time coursework at a CC.

Yeah I agree, if you go the CC route to knock out some gen eds you better have a game plan on where you plan to go next and what major you are going to enroll in so you can work with that school to make sure all the classes you are taking at CC will fully transfer over. If you just go into it without a plan you could wind up wasting some time with classes that don't transfer in.

 

[JP4CY]

To me a large paycheck has a lot to do with where you've worked. I hounded a small company near Ames for a year an internship and then they finally caved. They had never had an intern so it took a lot of persistence. That opened the door to even better internships and jobs. A snowball effect.

 

[Gonzo]

This is why I say Iowans do not get it. I did not get it until I lived out here.

The credential/educational rat race is intense and intense from birth out here. Parents sweat for two decades about where their kids will be admitted as undergraduates. Kids will kill themselves because they have to go to Brown and not Harvard. People look at me like I am a cow-milking hick when I tell them I went to ISU and like college sports.

I grew up in Boone and kind of just always assumed that, if I went to college (and 0/2 of my parents and 0/4 of my grandparents did, though some aunts and uncles did go with varying success rates), then it would just be down the road in Ames.

Completely different world out here for the children of the privileged.

What amused me about the original article -- it might all be for naught. You might be better off relaxing, getting into a minimally-selective state school and into one of their more practical majors like engineering, and ending up just as fine as the Ivy League graduates, and maybe ahead if accounting for cost of attendance and cost of living.

If you attend an Ivy League basketball game, one of the chants that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton students will get into against Cornell, Dartmouth, etc., is "Safety School", mocking them for not getting into a top-tier Ivy and having to settle for a lower tier Ivy.

 

[Sigmapolis]

If you attend an Ivy League basketball game, one of the chants that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton students will get into against Cornell, Dartmouth, etc., is "Safety School", mocking them for not getting into a top-tier Ivy and having to settle for a lower tier Ivy.

That's how Northwestern, Wisconsin, and Illinois students feel about Iowa.

 

[Gonzo]

If you can track it down, the documentary 'Nursery University' is pretty fascinating. Focuses on NYC parents trying to get their kids into the best possible nursery schools in the city. It's seriously life or death to them.

 

[cysmiley]

Agree, the connections they make are the keys to the kingdom.

And a huge part of it as well is the egos of the parents. Equally important to the opportunities they believe it creates, is the fact that they can brag on the cocktail party circuit that their kid is at Princeton, Yale, Harvard. That's a very real thing.

Well I brag on the cocktail circuit about my twin daughters that graduated from ISU in engineering with 4 points, both now have advanced degrees, successful careers, and have engineers from MIT, Georgia Tech and Cal Poly that work on teams they lead and supervise, not to mention International institutions. Go Cyclones!!!!

 

[CTTB78]

......Parents sweat for two decades about where their kids will be admitted as undergraduates. Kids will kill themselves because they have to go to Brown and not Harvard. People look at me like I am a cow-milking hick when I tell them I went to ISU and like college sports.
.......Completely different world out here for the children of the privileged.....

More like the children of snobs. And the level of arrogance varies by zip code.
This thread conversion came up a party I went to in Carmel. To the locals there, the Ivy schools are the junior league compared to the European universities that they all attended. When I told them that I went to ISU, I thought I might have to call 911.

 

[Sigmapolis]

More like the children of snobs. And the level of arrogance varies by zip code.
This thread conversion came up a party I went to in Carmel. To the locals there, the Ivy schools are the junior league compared to the European universities that they all attended. When I told them that I went to ISU, I thought I might have to call 911.

The hurricane of snobbery between Kittery, Maine and Fredericksburg, Virginia is strong.

 

[BCClone]

What I like about my ISU Ag. degree. In the Ag. world it is like having an Ivy league degree, even though the non-Ag people (at least those in towns larger than Des Moines) think I married my cousin, walk around in bibs, and are surprised I have all my own teeth. So, basically they think I'm from West Virginia.

 

[Gonzo]

More like the children of snobs. And the level of arrogance varies by zip code.
This thread conversion came up a party I went to in Carmel. To the locals there, the Ivy schools are the junior league compared to the European universities that they all attended. When I told them that I went to ISU, I thought I might have to call 911.

They'd be wrong.

 

[isufbcurt]

I went to Stansssburrryy the Haavard of the west - anyone get that reference?

 

[CTTB78]

They'd be wrong.

Most entitled snobs are.

 

[WIB]

Curious what your response to that was?

Also along this same discussion people who always have to let you know what their GPA is bugged me too. Some of the GPA requirements some companies have too for entry level jobs ticked me off when I first started applying for jobs my last semester. I get it, some use it as a weed out criteria for jobs that have a lot of applicants but I can tell you from my 2 summers of internship experience that book smart does not always mean someone is the most qualified for the job. Some of them had impressive GPAs (because they our course had to make sure we all knew it) but for the type of IT work we were doing they were dumb as hell when it came to the actual work we did which by now if they were planning to go into this type of work they should have some common knowledge of stuff that they won't teach you in classes. I'm really curious how things turned out for a few of those interns because I can bet they got a lot more interviews than I did just because of their GPA but I could run circles around them when it actually came to applying that knowledge to real life situations. One summer we were installing new network switches at 3 to 4 locations a week as part of some of our upgrades we were doing while on site. Near the end of the summer 1 guy I was working with that week says to me "so what exactly does this thing do?" as he is holding one of the new switches in his hands. My first response was "are you serious or just joking with me?" He said with a straight face he was serious. Wow... we had been installing these things for around 8 weeks by this time so you'd think he would have picked up some idea of what they do by now. We carried documentation manuals with us that had steps we had to do at each location for all the things we did there in a day and by the end of the summer most of us barely had to open our manuals because we had become so familiar with them while interns like him were still having to follow the manual step by step and even after all the repetition sometimes would struggle or mess up something.

I remember my senior year one of my MIS instructors brought a desktop PC into class with him and said today's lesson was on the hardware inside a PC. If you don't know your way around a PC by now you better start taking interest in it on your own time because this is stuff most employers are going to expect you to know if you work in IT and no other instructor here is probably teaching it either. He would pull out certain parts and ask who knew what it was, then he would take it over to them and for instance a DIMM of RAM he would ask the person to tell him some more specific like who made the part what speed it is, etc. and if it took someone longer than about 10 seconds time he'd take the part back and ask who else would like to take a shot because it shouldn't take that long to answer. It probably was an eye opening experience for some of the people in the class.

I didn’t end up getting the job (was under qualified to begin with) but I focused on work ethic and personal traits.

 

[cyclone4L]

Getting paid takes a lot of hard work and social/intellectual intelligence, something you can achieve at most colleges regardless of their elite status.

But the real benefit in attending these top schools is WHO you meet there because the likelihood of meeting someone with the right connections and resources to make your career happen are higher and will provide a potentially higher ceiling when it comes to how much you can achieve in whatever profession.

A lot of success is timing and preparedness (college), sure. But mostly it’s who you know.

I agree with this.

It is a mixture of who you know and where you went to school. In Iowa, the school name does not carry much weight because majority of the work force went to Midwestern schools that aren't Northwestern or WashU St Louis.

However, in the high level business field, the law field, and the medical field, where you went to college REALLY matters. A lesser candidate (in all other aspects) may get the job simply because they went to an Ivy League.

Obviously, your paycheck is really dependent on how hard you work. Landing those opportunities is about who you know, where you went to school, and a lot of dumb luck.

 

[LincolnWay187]

I work with people who went to TCU and SMU all around me, same titles/pay. ISU is a lot cheaper than those schools.

 

[SpokaneCY]

The formula hasn't changed. Work hard, know somebody and get lucky. Or know somebody and get lucky. Or just get lucky.

So many get by on their names or family names. At my company in Spokane, if you have ANY tie to Gonzaga basketball (spouse) you are a shoe-in. Lots of jock sniffers at the top of my company.

 

[Cyfern]

I think my investment in Iowa State has paid off....but then again, your results may vary. If I had a kid in high school, I would guide them into the trades, or a shorter trade school.....

Yep. Today's colleges and universities aren't what they used to be. Not so much about education, but more about indoctrination. If I were a parent again, I would steer my kids to trade schools as well. They are cheaper, provide a valuable, marketable education and in the end turn out better citizens. I've seen it first-hand.

 

[alarson]

The paper does not attempt to adjust for major.

The less prestigious schools having more science and engineering majors (and fewer arts and humanities majors) could explain how the gap is so close.

Then again, there are probably some MIT graduates doing well for themselves. I do not know if elite school's students are systematically biased towards or away from the majors that we all know are more remunerative in their opportunities.

Their charts are for median income, not mean.

The other thing in addition to majors i might question, selectivity might not be the best metric in itself when determining 'prestige'. Id be curious to see something that dug into the average wealth of student families. Like, a big benefit of a place like Harvard is that you're rubbing elbows with some of the elites, which as we all know, who you know can be pretty important. Selectivity may have some correlation there but not always.

 

[Sigmapolis]

The other thing in addition to majors i might question, selectivity might not be the best metric in itself when determining 'prestige'. Id be curious to see something that dug into the average wealth of student families. Like, a big benefit of a place like Harvard is that you're rubbing elbows with some of the elites, which as we all know, who you know can be pretty important. Selectivity may have some correlation there but not always.

I agree admissions rates is an imperfect measure... everything is going to be on some level... but I bet it is a pretty decent correlation to the above.

Your admissions rate is essentially a measurement of how badly people want to attend there relative to how many will actually attend there. That has to have at least some correlation with "prestige" and the rankings based on admissions selections.

The data seems to somewhat disagree with the bold point above, however. If that were true, you would expect a robust difference between the low-admission schools and the high- or open-admission schools and the incomes of graduates. It is not really showing up in the data (and even showing up at all with cost-of-living adjustments).

To paraphrase Moneyball, "If the connections from Harvard open so many doors for you, then why are we not seeing it in the early-career income data?"

One other complicating factor your post made me think of --

Many of the students at those most prestigious universities come from real money. Like, trust fund, do not need to worry about generating a lucrative or even a decent career for myself money. So they can be indulgent about what courses of study they pursue and/or with their career choices. They can work for nonprofits (and this is not a bad thing necessarily, working to better the world is a noble pursuit) or do something fun like journalism for peanuts or even nothing when they never have to worry about paying their rent.

A farm kid coming to Iowa State to start a career might take the career part of it more seriously than the child of a hedge fund manager at a private school in New England who was set for life the moment they drew breath.

 

[alarson]

Many of the students at those most prestigious universities come from real money. Like, trust fund, do not need to worry about generating a lucrative or even a decent career for myself money. So they can be indulgent about what courses of study they pursue and/or with their career choices. They can work for nonprofits (and this is not a bad thing necessarily, working to better the world is a noble pursuit) or do something fun like journalism for peanuts or even nothing when they never have to worry about paying their rent.

This might apply to those with a start up idea as well. Those connections might get the business off the ground but doesnt necessarily equal big pay right away for those