Do Ivy League graduates do any better?

Quartz reports.

Frank Bruni is wrong about Ivy League schools

Frank Bruni’s new book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, argues that the college you attend doesn’t really matter so much. The coveted Ivy League—and the wider range of elite schools—have more applications than ever before, but Bruni recommends that anxious students and their status-obsessed parents caught up in the admissions madness should calm down and relax—the school you go to cannot define you.

Which is, of course, both trite and true. In life, you are what you make of each opportunity. Yet Bruni himself, an influential New York Times columnist and prominent member of the US elite, makes an argument that somewhat contradicts his own educational history. After all, he graduated from a top public institution—The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill—and an Ivy League graduate school—Columbia University.

Would he be where he is today if he had just chosen a college or graduate school at random?

Bruni told The Washington Post that he decided to write the book “because of the constant chatter among his friends who have kids in high school and among his nieces and nephews ‘all whipped up in a frenzy’ over where to go to college.” He went on to say: “I was watching this and comparing it to my own life and the successful people I know… I wondered if there was anything in their résumés, a uniform attendance at a few select schools, and I didn’t see it. It wasn’t the case.”