'Accepted'
Rejecting the Ivies before they reject you.
On the taste page at the Journal today, there is an article about
people who choose not to go to ivies for various reasons. It's kind of
a lame article, as it doesn't really say anything, but it's a hook for
me to pontificate.
And they may have the right idea. Recent studies comparing Ivy League
students with students who were accepted to the Ivies but opted to go
elsewhere show that a diploma from Princeton or Yale has no real
bearing on future earnings. The individual matters much more than the
school.
This is of course something I'd like to believe, both for the sake
of my MBA-school-rejected ass and for the sake of my potential future
children and my nieces and nephews and goddaughter, etc. But although
the statistics may bear out the above claim, I think the statistics
neglect a key point.
The statistics measure average earnings. It doesn't measure access
to positions of power. In my experience when I've read bios of powerful
people, venture capitalists, big name politicos, CEOs, etc. the vast
majority (90%?) have had degrees from big name schools. I think it is
quite clear, for example, that you can't get a job as a clerk for a top
federal judge unless you went to a top law school. I haven't read a bio
for a tier 1 VC that didn't include a degree from one of the 'big 5'
b-schools. Among CEOs there seems to be more diversity of educational
backgrounds, but still a preponderance of big name schools.
So this claim that Ivies don't matter may well apply to the top 10%
of students, but does it apply to the top 1%? Or 0.1%? I suspect that
at this level, Ivies play a big role. Sending a top 10% student to an
Ivy league school probably would not put them on a path to power, and
they may as well have gone to a less famous school, but not sending a
top 1% or 0.1% student to a top school may well close doors that would
have been open, had they gone to that top school.
And the fact remains that white and asian students, even if they are
in the top 0.1%, still have a hard time gaining admission to the big
name schools.
UPDATE: In rereading this post I realized that I didn't really
explain my thinking properly. The problem with the statistics is not
any sort of difference between power and money. Money is probably an
adequate proxy for power, if not perfect. Even just on the dollar
earnings scale, I think the statistics are probably missing something.
I suspect that it goes something like this:
The average earnings at an ivy school vs a non-ivy school is
probably not different, even if you make comparisons among the top 10%,
top 1%, or top 0.1% of students. That's because only a small percentage
of ivy students go on to become top CEOs, VCs, lawyers, etc. The high
earnings among these top performers is diluted by the vast majority of
ivy students who perform on an 'average' level. Rather than comparing
average earnings of ivy students vs non-ivy students, another
comparison should be made of what percentage of ivy students earn in
the top 1% as adults vs what percent of top non-ivy students earn in
the top 1% as adults. I suspect that the percentage for ivy schools
(controlling for student quality, of course) is higher than for the
non-ivies.
Therefore it still would make sense to stress about getting into a
top school, unfortunately. Perhaps someone will actually do a study
along this axis, rather than just the mean, so my hypothesis can be
shown to be either true or false.
MR posted ab(out this subject in the past.)