It Doesn’t Matter Where You Go to College
Forget the elite universities. Here’s a viewpoint from a journalist that attended UNC Chapel Hill and Columbia University.
The Washington Post reports.
Forget Harvard and Stanford. It really doesn’t matter where you go to college
In the coming weeks, college acceptances will start rolling in for a select group of high-school seniors vying to get into the three dozen or so most-selective colleges and universities in the country. Most seniors planning to go to college this fall already have been accepted somewhere, either because they applied early or they chose less-selective schools that notify applicants almost immediately of their decision.
But for those waiting to hear from Harvard, Stanford, Williams, and other elite schools, this time of year is one of high anxiety. By May we’ll hear yet again from those campuses bragging about how they set records for the number of applications they received this year and how few students they accepted — likely about one out of every 10 applicants.
For all the attention showered on these elite college and universities, however, they enroll fewer than 6 percent of U.S. college students. To put it another way, Stanford received approximately 40,000 applications last year when about 3.4 million students graduated from high school across the U.S.
The competition for getting into elite colleges seems to be getting more intense, leaving frustrated students, parents, and counselors to wonder: Does it really matter where you go to college?
Forget Harvard and Stanford. It really doesn’t matter where you go to college (The Washington Post)
Comments
This can be taken one step further: increasingly, it doesn’t matter whether you go to college or not. Indeed, most would benefit from skipping college altogether. Those who absolutely need postsecondary training can always go back at a later date, with the clarity and focus that comes from knowing what you want to do and why you want to do it, rather than just kind of drifting into some major because you can’t put it off any longer.
This argument has already been capably rebutted here http://qz.com/367077/frank-bruni-is-wrong-about-ivy-league-schools/ and here by LoB https://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/debunking-frank-bruni/.
Bruni’s full of it.
Actually, you’re full of it.
Here’s Jonathan Wai’s measure of success:
“US Fortune 500 CEOs, federal judges, senators, House members, attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos (which included CEOs, journalists, academics, and people in government and policy), and the most powerful men and women according to Forbes”
I think Jonathan must have managed to get to Davos as a journalist. Otherwise his expensive education must have been wasted.
Does an Ivy League education make you more likely to be a decent person? I very much doubt it.
The point of the Quartz rebuttal is not to raise questions about individual decency, Bruni’s piece isn’t about that, but to undermine (successfully) the assumptions upon which Bruni’s piece rests, i.e., measuring the educational route of the most successful Americans. The Quartz article, by Jonathan Wai, accomplishes that by taking a much more comprehensive look at the available metrics, in other words engaging in good research. Bruni didn’t do that. He pulled a misleading stat and used it to pass on a feel good piece that appeals to American’s populist desires.
The biggest con in America for many years has been the failure to frankly describe to mediocre students their future career choices. Because they enjoy the revenues from tuition, schools don’t tell students the realities of getting a job in big finance without a high end degree, law students enter mediocre law schools every day imagining they will have a career in corporate law when none will get an interview, and Phds are being minted every year who will never teach at a college level. Most don’t know it.
The reality is that your future, at least as far as making it to the top of the American corporate, professional or academic world, is greatly narrowed once you either do or do not get into a high ranked college. That doesn’t mean you won’t have a decent life, but you are unlikely to be in top management at a fortune 500 company.
Young people ought to be told the truth earlier rather than later.