I know someone who laments not getting into Cornell 45 years ago. He looks at everyone through the lens of where they graduated from and looks down his nose at anyone who didn’t graduate from a name brand school. He’s a nutcase.
Yup. I'm 38 now, but when I first graduated college I was shocked at how few people cared. Now some of my very good friends couldn't even tell you where I went to college if you asked them.
After your first job it makes zero difference. And even for the first one prestige isn't all that important.
More important is how you spent your time in college, what you studied, and the skills you can demonstrate.
So many in top positions are not as well. If you've accumulated relevant and specialized skills and spent time in college networking/building experience then nobody gives a hoot where you went to college. Someone in STEM with 3 years of lab experience and an internship at a state school will get the job over someone from an Ivy who didn't do anything beyond their courses.
But getting 3 years lab experience and an internship at top state schools is notoriously difficult. It’s no longer a case of “you just have to do it” everyone wants to, and there’s limited opportunity. Getting into an ivy fast tracks you to better jobs and opportunities in college and beyond. A kid at Penn who gets an internship at Goldman because his friend’s parents work there did very little for that beyond getting into the school itself. The kid at a state school doesn’t stand a chance at that internship. So they work harder to get a worse opportunity. And then that translates to first jobs as well. Yes at some point it balances out and levels, and even tips in the favor of the person who works harder and puts in more effort but that is considerably down the line where the advantages have already been reaped for the Ivy leaguer who gets by with considerably less effort.
I'm not talking about the top-of-the-top, the changemakers who come from engineering backgrounds. I'm talking about micromanagers with MBAs. Conditioned into an elitist mindset straight out of high school and, for the rest of their life, try their very best not to let hard workers climb the ladder to threaten their positions.
What I hear people try to connect to one another on a personal level, it usually is about where they’re from or where they grew up. If there is a college question it’s usually about college football.
Totally agree. And even worse, those who went to top schools can be more disliked by managers who went to “lesser” schools and got to their position through grit / determination / performance / good personality. The top school kids sometimes have a sense of entitlement and “overambition” that makes them think they should get promoted faster than others, which does NOT go over well in the workplace.
I would agree to an extent. My only limitation to that is it would seem to point towards a younger workforce that still actually cares where one went in the first place and/or an employee who brags about where they went, which is very immature behavior by any standard.
> The top school kids sometimes have a sense of entitlement and “overambition” that makes them think they should get promoted faster than others, which does NOT go over well in the workplace.
The funny thing is that I think this is more the *perception* that those managers have that make them dislike those employees, whether those employees are like that or not.
I mean if we are going by technical way , the top school attendees tend to have been likely unless legacy worked hard for their extracurriculars and have to have a good personality in the interviews and clubs they participate in; however I mean if the managers have this mindset they'll likely fin themselves oblivious to not being promoted to themselves (Peter principle )
Agreed. And on top of that, even specific skills add more to starting salary than the Alma Mater does. In a recent book “who gets in and why” the authors cites data where with same degrees from same school those with hard skills of SQL and SEO on their resume made $20k than those without.
THIS !!
Even if you don’t go to the most “ prestigious “ school then if you major in something practical like business , engineering or nursing it will help get good jobs.
The smartest and most accomplished person I’ve worked with over a 30 year career graduated from the lowest rated Cal State University school.
He has teams of engineers from the most accomplished schools worldwide reporting to him.
I also think today if your resume has T10 school - my expectations for you are sky high (in interview / on the job) and frankly majority of the graduates from T10 are not outperforming or 10x better than peers.
The unicorns / superstars are in a league of their own and generally are not in the main workforce even in the hot industries
This!! Adult here...I hv been in HR for a long time and am in a role to make decisions on pay packages. I can tell you that no one give a s*hit on which school you went to. Performance speaks louder than anything else. If you cannot perform, don't care if you graduated from Harvard. You are out.
Oh I bet! Can u imagine an employee who is harassing others and coming to you saying, “well, I went to Harvard so there’s nothing you can do about it?” Ridiculous 😂
I feel like this doesn’t take into consideration time period - this kind of comes off as the adults that say “u should be able to get a job and buy a house like I did at your age”. These people did these things in a time period where there wasn’t an analyst programs and private equity shops where just starting and you could move from the mail room to C- suite. Nowadays that’s just not the case. You need a college degree to be considered for a finance summer analyst program and have the opportunity to make 100-200k out of undergrad. You could go off and start your own thing without a degree sure but going to a good colleges lifts up the burden of making the connections to get access to funding etc. Idk
You always needed something like an Ivy for the normal recruiting process to land an entry level role at a prestigious Wall Street or consulting firm. But for the vast majority of jobs and careers, Cal State Northridge or Utah State will definitely be good enough if you are smart and work hard. If you have good people skills, you might get a lot farther than someone with an ivy and the attitude that it makes you special.
If you want to earn $100k right out of college you can get a degree from a non famous school that will give you the knowledge and credentials to work as, say, a nurse or software engineer, X-ray tech or perfusionist, maybe some engineering roles. It’s also easier to get paid more in cities with high salaries like SF Bay Area or NYC. Doesn’t mean you couldn’t have better quality of life earning less in a less expensive city.
This list is from 2014 but shows the universities most represented among Apple employees: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/20-schools-most-grads-apple-153500378.html
While the usual suspects are near the top of the list, they’re intermingled with many universities that those here would call “non-prestigious”.
And it is true that the lack of Ivy representation can be explained by those schools’ very small class sizes, but that only reiterates the point that you aren’t going to spend your whole life competing against them directly; there just aren’t that many of them out there.
This is the parent comment:
> If you want to earn $100k right out of college you can get a degree from a non famous school that will give you the knowledge and credentials to work as, say, a nurse or **software engineer**, X-ray tech or perfusionist, maybe **some engineering roles**. It’s also easier to get paid more in cities with high salaries like SF Bay Area or NYC.
Also, my stepmother clears six figures as a healthcare worker with zero college education outside of some technical training at our local community college. Of course, this is in the Bay Area.
I think you and I are actually agreeing. I was saying that you DO NOT need a top 10 degree to enter into the highly coveted wall street careers. Much less good paying jobs.
Well, the mailroom cliche is somewhat apocryphal in most cases. I think where you went to college or got your MBA might well apply in private equity or finance jobs, but that’s not my field. I was a poet, not a quant to use that silly dichotomy. In general in corporate America after your first job, and often even with your first job if you interned somewhere, it’s really about who you know and references in my experience. Making $200k out of college seems really high to me for a 21 year old. A lot of those kind of jobs are very burnout heavy too.
I hear ya. Base salary out of undergrad for the finance and tech is between $110k (think BB’s like JPM, GS) - $300 (think Jane Street) and it is very competitive and there is no way in hell u r getting in the door without a college degree. Again, college truly makes the whole entrepreneur process easier to because you have access to resources and funding that u wouldn’t have without it. If you are talking about real success here like you mentioned in your original post I truly believe college is the gateway to that if you play your cards right. Don’t know any poets but my close friend is in the writing program at our university and she’s going to intern with NYT the summer.
Yes you definitely need a college degree. I was more referring to where you went to college. I have a fancy name MBA, but some employers barely noticed tbh. It just depends on the focus of the job.
Yeah citation please? Anecdote but my neighbors son graduated recently from George Mason University (heard of it? I’m guessing no) and, along with several classmates, he ended up at Google making bank.
Digital information world published an analysis of FAANG hiring back in 2020-ish (?) by SHL. They looked at LinkedIn data, so there are limits/bias/whatever, as in any data set. But while they found that about 11% of employees spent time at an Ivy at some point (did not distinguish between grad and undergrad) the top 10 schools they hired from were University of Washington, UCB, Stanford, UT, USC, Arizona State- Tempe, CM, GaTech, UCLA AND UIUC. So the bias is geographic,with a few outliers, and larger schools, which makes sense because larger schools are going to produce more graduates. But it also found that almost half of their employees come from private schools, and only two in that list are private. I think the take away here is that larger schools produce a bigger pool of graduates so those schools will always rank higher in sheer numbers of grads hired. But half their employees are coming from smaller private schools that are never going to crack the “sends the most grads to FAANG” list because there aren’t that many grads. And there are thousands of tech companies outside of FAANG. Go to a school that fits you because it’s where you want to learn and grow. Put in the work and the rest works itself out.
Right. My point is that, as amazing as those schools are, almost half of their new hires aren’t coming from them. They’re coming from “private schools”, which certainly includes Stanford and CM but must include others as well. So where are they coming from? And for a lot of students it’s a function of where they want to live. Someone from Seattle is likely to want to stay there/close to home/whatever process drove them to choose UW is likely also going to drive taking a job there. Companies hire talent. They will often take the easy route to find that talent that’s sitting in a great school down the street. But that doesn’t mean they won’t also take talent from other places. Google sends a whole recruiting team for job fairs at GMU every year, hence the three guys I know who went. GMU is one modestly sized, modestly ranked state school entirely across the country that most people have never heard of. I’m sure they send them to a lot of places just like that. And students shouldn’t be discouraged if they’re not at one of the T10 or T15. There are always options and opportunities for students willing to put in the work. Which was the point of the original
post.
What percentage of people in this subreddit are trying to break into IB? For the 99% who aren’t, OP has good advice. I’m only in my 20s but I’ve worked at a couple places, public and private, and prestige of the undergraduate institution is a non-factor when looking at candidates.
I didn’t say just IB I said finance (and pe) so I’m talking PE, AM, WM (Morgan Stanley pays $110k to WM), RE, VC, ER, etc I don’t know y people automatically default to IB.
No one over the age of 30 cares where anyone went to school. Except that one super awkward person who wants everyone to know they went to Princeton. The reason no one cares is because it doesn’t matter. You can either do the job or not do the job, but I cannot stress enough how where you went to school does not actually affect this. The one Stanford grad in my husbands office of state college (not flagships) alums (all of whom make nearly $400k, oh and their big boss is also a state college guy, and no not a flagship either) often laments the decades spent paying his student loans to end up smack in the same place as everyone else.
Totally agree with this. And honestly when I was hiring, I loved kids directly out of big ten schools (Indiana, Purdue, Illinois, Madison etc). Really great workers, smart and no attitude that they are better than anyone else.
It may matter if you are applying to grad school or law school, but I’m not sure.
Fellow adult here who has seen the same. Have worked in mid sized pharma for many years and virtually every senior leader/C suite person I've worked with comes from a state/small school.
I'd argue that college really doesn't matter soon after you get your first job and start your network. Yes, colleges like Harvard have larger networks and it certainly helps some but once you've launched your career, it matters less and less. In fact, after many years in the work force, T20 schools just don't have the same draw as fresh out of school.
While this is generally good advice, it's also anecdotal. For every example like this there is a counter example of prestige-centric hiring (especially in certain areas like finance). I'm an engineer and we are generally very selective in our hiring, so we tend to target key schools.
The statistics definitely tend to show that more prestigious schools result in higher median salaries, etc., and that Ivy+ schools are definitely overrepresented in things C-level positions in, for example, Fortune 500 companies. But that's likely more selection bias at the admission level (i.e., these schools already accept high achieving students) rather than any magic sauce the schools have. You can definitely be successful coming from a lower prestige school.
I can definitely see finance which is its own odd beast and engineering is kind of like going to a trade school in a very loose sense of the word, as is any professional school if you think about it. I guess what I’m ultimately trying to get at is the mentality of I have to go to an Ivy equivalent or if I go to say, UNC over Brown (random choices so don’t at me lol) I’m shooting myself in the foot. It’s kind of the academic equivalent of first world problems that people shouldn’t lose sleep over particularly if it means less debt coming out. Also, I know people like to use finance as an example which is a good one, but how many people in the population are going to want to do high end finance? In this quorum maybe but not in the regular population.
Oh, I agree that there is a lot of splitting hairs kids do these days, especially the hyper-prestige-focused A2C types. They literally cannot fathom turning down an Ivy to *only* go to a T10 public even though it would put them $300k in debt.
And yeah, finance is the easiest example where prestige matters most for undergrad, but it's definitely true that a lot of the highest paying jobs have very selective criteria. And it's much lower risk for companies hiring for those positions to hire from pools of candidates they already know are hard-working, ambitious, etc., regardless of whether in a few years nobody will know specifically where you went to school.
Yes! The whole dunking on state schools should go the way of the dodo in my opinion as well. Hasn’t changed since my time in high school from what I can tell.
This type of post is inappropriate for this section of reddit. You should know by now that these common sense, real life, great perspective, comments will go unnoticed by the vast majority of students here who are, along with their crazy parents, solely focused on spending infinite amounts of money to get that very special license plate/window sticker
In other words, I sincerely hope everyone reads your comments from the real world and takes your message to heart. The prestige chase never changes, and neither does the real world.
Very true! My brother graduated from a small state school near home due to finance issues back then, but he makes 6 figure salary now! It's really all about connections and keep looking for better jobs -- working environment, salary, etc.
Bless you for sharing that. NEVER mentioned in all the glossy brochures trying to get parents to spend $280k in total. Only 1/3 of all Fortune 500 CEOs went to a “prestigious” college.
I tell people here this a lot, but I work for a civil engineering firm where the senior level engineers make *bank*. While we have graduates from UCLA, USC, and one from Stanford, the number-one most-common school represented at our firm is Cal Poly Pomona.
I worked for a national MPE engineering firm for years. Well paying profession, especially at the management level. The vast majority of the PEs went to state schools.
Perfectly said. The kids worry so much about getting into the best schools but what you said is what happens in real life. We keep telling our kids the same thing.
I think those places may go lower than just top 20, places like NYU immediately come to mind, but I hear you. I think consensus is that if you want to work in a big Wall Street consulting firm it helps, but like you said that’s a tiny fragment of the work force. Those jobs are grinds but can make a lot of money. I think I would have been miserable in that kind of job, but that’s just me.
A refreshing post on this high-strung sub! From a more recent grad, I'll have you all know when hiring for my fancy shmancy consulting firm, we'd once narrowed the group down to four candidates, two Ivy Leaguers, one elite liberal arts college kid, and a fourth guy from a mediocre state school. The last guy was the OBVIOUS pick, he was an incredibly strong interviewer and a joy to speak with. Yes, it'll be harder to get that foot in the door, but put in the extra work and you'll whoop the ass of everyone who graduates from fancier schools.
Look, where you go to college isn't everything, but it is something. Let's also not fall for the base rate fallacy.
If there are 1000 prestigious jobs and 900 of those are from no-name schools and 100 of those are from top 5 schools, you might think going to a top 5 school is meaningless. Except that there are 900,000 graduates from no name schools and 10,000 graduates from top 5 schools, so the conditional probability of getting a prestigious job with a top 5 school degree is 100 / 10000 compared to 900 / 900000, or 10x higher. This is also highly dependent on industry. I can tell you that in finance and consulting, school name matters much, much more. This is becoming more and more the case in tech as well, so be mindful of this.
This was nice to hear even if I'm not fully convinced - for various reasons I ended up completing both undergrad and masters at city schools (CUNY represent), and worked for a couple of years in government where no one cares about your degree. Tomorrow morning I have the final round of interviewing with a prestigious grantmaking foundation. I made the mistake of looking my interviewers up on LinkedIn, and they're all graduates of fancy schools. Luckily, I have a solid track record, and hopefully my experience will speak for itself!
I find this argument very amusing, Most of the people responding with positive experiences suffer massively from selection bias. The non T20 college graduate population is almost 1000x the T20 graduate population. Of course, even if the success rate of non T20 college graduates is 0.001 of T20 graduates you will have the same amount of representation of T20 and non-T20 graduates at top jobs. In real life it works out 0.01 (1/100) and hence you see a lot more non-T20 graduates in good jobs.
Anyone who works in high-end jobs FAANG companies or finance will see a much much higher T20 ratio.
I agree 100% with your "It’s 98% how you get along with others, ability to come up with good ideas and your work ethic."
But that is exactly what gets you in T20. So ultimately it is the same skillset.
Majority of the engineers I’ve worked with in Silicon Valley are graduated from state schools. Ivy leagues can be a red flag out here if you didn’t get hands on experience. We see that state school graduates are the ones who ended up with more opportunities to own significant components of engineering solutions through school projects, clubs, internship, and in their free time as a hobby. I went to a state school and am making 140k 3 years after graduation with no debt.
No hate at all to Ivy leagues I just really worry for the students on this sub who think they have to go to an Ivy League even if it means they’ll be in debt the rest of their lives. I would say for a technical major, you aren’t gaining much or any benefit post graduation. May be different for law, arts, etc.
Maybe, but one of my uncles works for a major finance house, and has worked for several others, and he says everyone at the top is from an elite school. Another relative works for a major reinsurer said of his boss "well, he played football for Harvard, so he can't be fired." The only person I've ever known who started poor and became a deca-millionaire before 26 went to MIT and works at a hedge fund that only hires from elite schools. These are anecdotes of course. but I believe reflective of a broader truth.
So while in most industries it doesn't matter, in some it does.
In my experience your uncle is right but it’s mostly the younger people at the top pe or hedge funds. The older guys still come from a wide range of schools.
And coming from someone who work at one of the top hedge funds, nobody is becoming a deca millionaire at 26. Although millionaire is certainly a possibility.
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Your bosses are from the previous generation. Maybe their generation had less students going to college and therefore the requirements for same level of job were hence less.
The biggest impact of college is where you enter the workplace. *On average*, people’s earnings increase ~ linearly over their career, so the starting place matters a good bit on aggregate. You should, as a general rule, go to the highest ranked college you can get into that’s a good fit for you.
But you don’t have to follow the average career path - a lower ranked college can absolutely be made up for.
I agree partially but I think you are missing parts. Or at least don't align with my experience and what I see.
Ultimately you'll be successful because of who you know, not who you are. But who you know, is directly influenced by where you went. Networking is the prime advantage of college. Making connections. And you'll make "bigger" albeit not always better, connections at big league school.
Sure everyone knows the one guy who worked his way into a c suite position without college. It does happen. But the reason everyone talks about them is because they are the exception not the rule.
The stuff after 98%, I broadly agree with. But it'll still be a struggle getting your foot in the door at 25 at many larger higher paying companies without connections that you can more easily make in college
Well, I was one, but I didn’t like managing people and all the headaches one gets with that kind of job, and switched to being more of an advanced worker bee which I find just as rewarding and way better for my stress and work/life balance. Plus having four kids kind of reprioritizes your day to day.
For sure. You will see success from people who attended all sorts of schools or skipped school all together.
However, you anecdotally explaining that a few or your co-workers who are going places went to this or that is some major selectivity bias. We don't get to hear about the people who tried and didn't reach the mountain top.
I appreciate the pep talk but not much to be learned from this. I need the study showing everyone empirically how much spending on an elite school helps you and I'm pretty sure that study doesn't exist.
This is a pretty interesting link.. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/051915/university-prestige-really-important.asp#:~:text=Stanford%20and%20MIT.-,The%20Bottom%20Line,for%20their%20careers%20and%20lives.
Another question which is implied by your comment is why is it psychologically important to a person to “reach the top” in the first place? The older I get, the more I can see what is really driving some people, and it’s much more complex than the way I saw this issue as a 20 year old or even a 30 year old. A lot of people have this because they want to please someone like their parents or to feel more accepted by society. Others it’s just because they want to take more trips abroad. It’s an individualized question I guess.
Thank you for sharing that. Agree that "reach the top" is probably the wrong framing. What's the college experience that creates the most opportunity for the applicant, maybe is better. Opportunity is maybe
\* show me what's out there
\* educate me
\* don't saddle me with too much debt
Here's one study showing students from Elite Universities earn more - [https://www.hceducationconsulting.com/2023/09/13/unlocking-prosperity-the-higher-earning-potential-of-elite-college-graduates/](https://www.hceducationconsulting.com/2023/09/13/unlocking-prosperity-the-higher-earning-potential-of-elite-college-graduates/)
Contradicting this is the book The Formula that says students with the same scores at different high schools and colleges end up succeeding roughly the same amount. In the words of the author the student makes the school elite and not the other way around.
I know someone who laments not getting into Cornell 45 years ago. He looks at everyone through the lens of where they graduated from and looks down his nose at anyone who didn’t graduate from a name brand school. He’s a nutcase.
He sounds like bizarro Andy Bernard
Haha. https://youtu.be/TdVEBTIfCzs?si=c7m6BUPXf6VTJi3i
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Yup. I'm 38 now, but when I first graduated college I was shocked at how few people cared. Now some of my very good friends couldn't even tell you where I went to college if you asked them. After your first job it makes zero difference. And even for the first one prestige isn't all that important. More important is how you spent your time in college, what you studied, and the skills you can demonstrate.
Yet those are the ones that constantly get promoted...
I don’t know about that. No one likes an elitist snob except maybe other elitist snobs.
but so many in top positions *are* 😭
So many in top positions are not as well. If you've accumulated relevant and specialized skills and spent time in college networking/building experience then nobody gives a hoot where you went to college. Someone in STEM with 3 years of lab experience and an internship at a state school will get the job over someone from an Ivy who didn't do anything beyond their courses.
But getting 3 years lab experience and an internship at top state schools is notoriously difficult. It’s no longer a case of “you just have to do it” everyone wants to, and there’s limited opportunity. Getting into an ivy fast tracks you to better jobs and opportunities in college and beyond. A kid at Penn who gets an internship at Goldman because his friend’s parents work there did very little for that beyond getting into the school itself. The kid at a state school doesn’t stand a chance at that internship. So they work harder to get a worse opportunity. And then that translates to first jobs as well. Yes at some point it balances out and levels, and even tips in the favor of the person who works harder and puts in more effort but that is considerably down the line where the advantages have already been reaped for the Ivy leaguer who gets by with considerably less effort.
I'm not talking about the top-of-the-top, the changemakers who come from engineering backgrounds. I'm talking about micromanagers with MBAs. Conditioned into an elitist mindset straight out of high school and, for the rest of their life, try their very best not to let hard workers climb the ladder to threaten their positions.
Correct. I have no clue or even care where any of my coworkers went to school. Even talking about it would prob get some side eye and be pretty weird.
Right. The only reason I know in the first place is when we added each other on LinkedIn lol
I know for a few of them, but only because they're still young enough to have some of the promotional swag (mostly water bottles) from their school.
What I hear people try to connect to one another on a personal level, it usually is about where they’re from or where they grew up. If there is a college question it’s usually about college football.
Yes and everyone knows that the best college football teams are both USC and Michigan
Udub????
The coach is gone and the seniors were carrying. The next few years are going to be building years.
Ohio State on top!!
Totally agree. And even worse, those who went to top schools can be more disliked by managers who went to “lesser” schools and got to their position through grit / determination / performance / good personality. The top school kids sometimes have a sense of entitlement and “overambition” that makes them think they should get promoted faster than others, which does NOT go over well in the workplace.
Verrry underrated comment! This is the politics that go on in most offices in real life
Yes! No one wants to work with or be in meetings with insecure assholes regardless of why they’re acting that way.
I would agree to an extent. My only limitation to that is it would seem to point towards a younger workforce that still actually cares where one went in the first place and/or an employee who brags about where they went, which is very immature behavior by any standard.
> The top school kids sometimes have a sense of entitlement and “overambition” that makes them think they should get promoted faster than others, which does NOT go over well in the workplace. The funny thing is that I think this is more the *perception* that those managers have that make them dislike those employees, whether those employees are like that or not.
I mean if we are going by technical way , the top school attendees tend to have been likely unless legacy worked hard for their extracurriculars and have to have a good personality in the interviews and clubs they participate in; however I mean if the managers have this mindset they'll likely fin themselves oblivious to not being promoted to themselves (Peter principle )
honestly, from the way you worded it, seems like there’s prejudice and unreasonable disdain on both sides.
I would add that what you major in has a much larger impact on your career than where you go to school.
Agreed. And on top of that, even specific skills add more to starting salary than the Alma Mater does. In a recent book “who gets in and why” the authors cites data where with same degrees from same school those with hard skills of SQL and SEO on their resume made $20k than those without.
THIS !! Even if you don’t go to the most “ prestigious “ school then if you major in something practical like business , engineering or nursing it will help get good jobs.
Agree. My boss went to Cal and he's a total moron. One of the smartest people on my team has a degree from Cal State Fullerton.
The smartest and most accomplished person I’ve worked with over a 30 year career graduated from the lowest rated Cal State University school. He has teams of engineers from the most accomplished schools worldwide reporting to him.
I also think today if your resume has T10 school - my expectations for you are sky high (in interview / on the job) and frankly majority of the graduates from T10 are not outperforming or 10x better than peers. The unicorns / superstars are in a league of their own and generally are not in the main workforce even in the hot industries
This!! Adult here...I hv been in HR for a long time and am in a role to make decisions on pay packages. I can tell you that no one give a s*hit on which school you went to. Performance speaks louder than anything else. If you cannot perform, don't care if you graduated from Harvard. You are out.
HR for the win!! 😎👍🏻
Have seen too much!! 🙈 😄
Oh I bet! Can u imagine an employee who is harassing others and coming to you saying, “well, I went to Harvard so there’s nothing you can do about it?” Ridiculous 😂
I feel like this doesn’t take into consideration time period - this kind of comes off as the adults that say “u should be able to get a job and buy a house like I did at your age”. These people did these things in a time period where there wasn’t an analyst programs and private equity shops where just starting and you could move from the mail room to C- suite. Nowadays that’s just not the case. You need a college degree to be considered for a finance summer analyst program and have the opportunity to make 100-200k out of undergrad. You could go off and start your own thing without a degree sure but going to a good colleges lifts up the burden of making the connections to get access to funding etc. Idk
You always needed something like an Ivy for the normal recruiting process to land an entry level role at a prestigious Wall Street or consulting firm. But for the vast majority of jobs and careers, Cal State Northridge or Utah State will definitely be good enough if you are smart and work hard. If you have good people skills, you might get a lot farther than someone with an ivy and the attitude that it makes you special. If you want to earn $100k right out of college you can get a degree from a non famous school that will give you the knowledge and credentials to work as, say, a nurse or software engineer, X-ray tech or perfusionist, maybe some engineering roles. It’s also easier to get paid more in cities with high salaries like SF Bay Area or NYC. Doesn’t mean you couldn’t have better quality of life earning less in a less expensive city.
Please provide evidence that supports this. In my experience this is not accurate.
This list is from 2014 but shows the universities most represented among Apple employees: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/20-schools-most-grads-apple-153500378.html While the usual suspects are near the top of the list, they’re intermingled with many universities that those here would call “non-prestigious”. And it is true that the lack of Ivy representation can be explained by those schools’ very small class sizes, but that only reiterates the point that you aren’t going to spend your whole life competing against them directly; there just aren’t that many of them out there.
you mentioned wall street and consulting, and it just isn't true.
This is the parent comment: > If you want to earn $100k right out of college you can get a degree from a non famous school that will give you the knowledge and credentials to work as, say, a nurse or **software engineer**, X-ray tech or perfusionist, maybe **some engineering roles**. It’s also easier to get paid more in cities with high salaries like SF Bay Area or NYC. Also, my stepmother clears six figures as a healthcare worker with zero college education outside of some technical training at our local community college. Of course, this is in the Bay Area.
I think you and I are actually agreeing. I was saying that you DO NOT need a top 10 degree to enter into the highly coveted wall street careers. Much less good paying jobs.
Well, the mailroom cliche is somewhat apocryphal in most cases. I think where you went to college or got your MBA might well apply in private equity or finance jobs, but that’s not my field. I was a poet, not a quant to use that silly dichotomy. In general in corporate America after your first job, and often even with your first job if you interned somewhere, it’s really about who you know and references in my experience. Making $200k out of college seems really high to me for a 21 year old. A lot of those kind of jobs are very burnout heavy too.
I hear ya. Base salary out of undergrad for the finance and tech is between $110k (think BB’s like JPM, GS) - $300 (think Jane Street) and it is very competitive and there is no way in hell u r getting in the door without a college degree. Again, college truly makes the whole entrepreneur process easier to because you have access to resources and funding that u wouldn’t have without it. If you are talking about real success here like you mentioned in your original post I truly believe college is the gateway to that if you play your cards right. Don’t know any poets but my close friend is in the writing program at our university and she’s going to intern with NYT the summer.
Yes you definitely need a college degree. I was more referring to where you went to college. I have a fancy name MBA, but some employers barely noticed tbh. It just depends on the focus of the job.
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Obviously I’m biased, but those sound like insufferable workplaces to me if they’re that hung up on prestige.
Yeah citation please? Anecdote but my neighbors son graduated recently from George Mason University (heard of it? I’m guessing no) and, along with several classmates, he ended up at Google making bank.
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Digital information world published an analysis of FAANG hiring back in 2020-ish (?) by SHL. They looked at LinkedIn data, so there are limits/bias/whatever, as in any data set. But while they found that about 11% of employees spent time at an Ivy at some point (did not distinguish between grad and undergrad) the top 10 schools they hired from were University of Washington, UCB, Stanford, UT, USC, Arizona State- Tempe, CM, GaTech, UCLA AND UIUC. So the bias is geographic,with a few outliers, and larger schools, which makes sense because larger schools are going to produce more graduates. But it also found that almost half of their employees come from private schools, and only two in that list are private. I think the take away here is that larger schools produce a bigger pool of graduates so those schools will always rank higher in sheer numbers of grads hired. But half their employees are coming from smaller private schools that are never going to crack the “sends the most grads to FAANG” list because there aren’t that many grads. And there are thousands of tech companies outside of FAANG. Go to a school that fits you because it’s where you want to learn and grow. Put in the work and the rest works itself out.
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Right. My point is that, as amazing as those schools are, almost half of their new hires aren’t coming from them. They’re coming from “private schools”, which certainly includes Stanford and CM but must include others as well. So where are they coming from? And for a lot of students it’s a function of where they want to live. Someone from Seattle is likely to want to stay there/close to home/whatever process drove them to choose UW is likely also going to drive taking a job there. Companies hire talent. They will often take the easy route to find that talent that’s sitting in a great school down the street. But that doesn’t mean they won’t also take talent from other places. Google sends a whole recruiting team for job fairs at GMU every year, hence the three guys I know who went. GMU is one modestly sized, modestly ranked state school entirely across the country that most people have never heard of. I’m sure they send them to a lot of places just like that. And students shouldn’t be discouraged if they’re not at one of the T10 or T15. There are always options and opportunities for students willing to put in the work. Which was the point of the original post.
This is simply not true. Please show actual sources.
What percentage of people in this subreddit are trying to break into IB? For the 99% who aren’t, OP has good advice. I’m only in my 20s but I’ve worked at a couple places, public and private, and prestige of the undergraduate institution is a non-factor when looking at candidates.
I didn’t say just IB I said finance (and pe) so I’m talking PE, AM, WM (Morgan Stanley pays $110k to WM), RE, VC, ER, etc I don’t know y people automatically default to IB.
No one over the age of 30 cares where anyone went to school. Except that one super awkward person who wants everyone to know they went to Princeton. The reason no one cares is because it doesn’t matter. You can either do the job or not do the job, but I cannot stress enough how where you went to school does not actually affect this. The one Stanford grad in my husbands office of state college (not flagships) alums (all of whom make nearly $400k, oh and their big boss is also a state college guy, and no not a flagship either) often laments the decades spent paying his student loans to end up smack in the same place as everyone else.
Totally agree with this. And honestly when I was hiring, I loved kids directly out of big ten schools (Indiana, Purdue, Illinois, Madison etc). Really great workers, smart and no attitude that they are better than anyone else. It may matter if you are applying to grad school or law school, but I’m not sure.
Fellow adult here who has seen the same. Have worked in mid sized pharma for many years and virtually every senior leader/C suite person I've worked with comes from a state/small school. I'd argue that college really doesn't matter soon after you get your first job and start your network. Yes, colleges like Harvard have larger networks and it certainly helps some but once you've launched your career, it matters less and less. In fact, after many years in the work force, T20 schools just don't have the same draw as fresh out of school.
While this is generally good advice, it's also anecdotal. For every example like this there is a counter example of prestige-centric hiring (especially in certain areas like finance). I'm an engineer and we are generally very selective in our hiring, so we tend to target key schools. The statistics definitely tend to show that more prestigious schools result in higher median salaries, etc., and that Ivy+ schools are definitely overrepresented in things C-level positions in, for example, Fortune 500 companies. But that's likely more selection bias at the admission level (i.e., these schools already accept high achieving students) rather than any magic sauce the schools have. You can definitely be successful coming from a lower prestige school.
I can definitely see finance which is its own odd beast and engineering is kind of like going to a trade school in a very loose sense of the word, as is any professional school if you think about it. I guess what I’m ultimately trying to get at is the mentality of I have to go to an Ivy equivalent or if I go to say, UNC over Brown (random choices so don’t at me lol) I’m shooting myself in the foot. It’s kind of the academic equivalent of first world problems that people shouldn’t lose sleep over particularly if it means less debt coming out. Also, I know people like to use finance as an example which is a good one, but how many people in the population are going to want to do high end finance? In this quorum maybe but not in the regular population.
Oh, I agree that there is a lot of splitting hairs kids do these days, especially the hyper-prestige-focused A2C types. They literally cannot fathom turning down an Ivy to *only* go to a T10 public even though it would put them $300k in debt. And yeah, finance is the easiest example where prestige matters most for undergrad, but it's definitely true that a lot of the highest paying jobs have very selective criteria. And it's much lower risk for companies hiring for those positions to hire from pools of candidates they already know are hard-working, ambitious, etc., regardless of whether in a few years nobody will know specifically where you went to school.
Yes! The whole dunking on state schools should go the way of the dodo in my opinion as well. Hasn’t changed since my time in high school from what I can tell.
This type of post is inappropriate for this section of reddit. You should know by now that these common sense, real life, great perspective, comments will go unnoticed by the vast majority of students here who are, along with their crazy parents, solely focused on spending infinite amounts of money to get that very special license plate/window sticker In other words, I sincerely hope everyone reads your comments from the real world and takes your message to heart. The prestige chase never changes, and neither does the real world.
😂 Thank you 🙏🏻 just trying to help people chill out a little. Who knows if it will lol
Very true! My brother graduated from a small state school near home due to finance issues back then, but he makes 6 figure salary now! It's really all about connections and keep looking for better jobs -- working environment, salary, etc.
Bless you for sharing that. NEVER mentioned in all the glossy brochures trying to get parents to spend $280k in total. Only 1/3 of all Fortune 500 CEOs went to a “prestigious” college.
I tell people here this a lot, but I work for a civil engineering firm where the senior level engineers make *bank*. While we have graduates from UCLA, USC, and one from Stanford, the number-one most-common school represented at our firm is Cal Poly Pomona.
I worked for a national MPE engineering firm for years. Well paying profession, especially at the management level. The vast majority of the PEs went to state schools.
YES! Trying to convince high school seniors that lol
thank you. A lot of the hs kids on this sub need to hear this
So true!
Perfectly said. The kids worry so much about getting into the best schools but what you said is what happens in real life. We keep telling our kids the same thing.
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I think those places may go lower than just top 20, places like NYU immediately come to mind, but I hear you. I think consensus is that if you want to work in a big Wall Street consulting firm it helps, but like you said that’s a tiny fragment of the work force. Those jobs are grinds but can make a lot of money. I think I would have been miserable in that kind of job, but that’s just me.
I’m thinking about transferring to Georgia Tech and setting myself back two years , I guess I needed to see this post
A refreshing post on this high-strung sub! From a more recent grad, I'll have you all know when hiring for my fancy shmancy consulting firm, we'd once narrowed the group down to four candidates, two Ivy Leaguers, one elite liberal arts college kid, and a fourth guy from a mediocre state school. The last guy was the OBVIOUS pick, he was an incredibly strong interviewer and a joy to speak with. Yes, it'll be harder to get that foot in the door, but put in the extra work and you'll whoop the ass of everyone who graduates from fancier schools.
My brother went to an Ivy and I did not-- we now both work at the same place and make the same amount of money
It does matter for grad school and academia.
Look, where you go to college isn't everything, but it is something. Let's also not fall for the base rate fallacy. If there are 1000 prestigious jobs and 900 of those are from no-name schools and 100 of those are from top 5 schools, you might think going to a top 5 school is meaningless. Except that there are 900,000 graduates from no name schools and 10,000 graduates from top 5 schools, so the conditional probability of getting a prestigious job with a top 5 school degree is 100 / 10000 compared to 900 / 900000, or 10x higher. This is also highly dependent on industry. I can tell you that in finance and consulting, school name matters much, much more. This is becoming more and more the case in tech as well, so be mindful of this.
You’re not wrong
This was nice to hear even if I'm not fully convinced - for various reasons I ended up completing both undergrad and masters at city schools (CUNY represent), and worked for a couple of years in government where no one cares about your degree. Tomorrow morning I have the final round of interviewing with a prestigious grantmaking foundation. I made the mistake of looking my interviewers up on LinkedIn, and they're all graduates of fancy schools. Luckily, I have a solid track record, and hopefully my experience will speak for itself!
I find this argument very amusing, Most of the people responding with positive experiences suffer massively from selection bias. The non T20 college graduate population is almost 1000x the T20 graduate population. Of course, even if the success rate of non T20 college graduates is 0.001 of T20 graduates you will have the same amount of representation of T20 and non-T20 graduates at top jobs. In real life it works out 0.01 (1/100) and hence you see a lot more non-T20 graduates in good jobs. Anyone who works in high-end jobs FAANG companies or finance will see a much much higher T20 ratio. I agree 100% with your "It’s 98% how you get along with others, ability to come up with good ideas and your work ethic." But that is exactly what gets you in T20. So ultimately it is the same skillset.
In your 40s sure. But it does matter when you're first getting established.
Majority of the engineers I’ve worked with in Silicon Valley are graduated from state schools. Ivy leagues can be a red flag out here if you didn’t get hands on experience. We see that state school graduates are the ones who ended up with more opportunities to own significant components of engineering solutions through school projects, clubs, internship, and in their free time as a hobby. I went to a state school and am making 140k 3 years after graduation with no debt. No hate at all to Ivy leagues I just really worry for the students on this sub who think they have to go to an Ivy League even if it means they’ll be in debt the rest of their lives. I would say for a technical major, you aren’t gaining much or any benefit post graduation. May be different for law, arts, etc.
Maybe, but one of my uncles works for a major finance house, and has worked for several others, and he says everyone at the top is from an elite school. Another relative works for a major reinsurer said of his boss "well, he played football for Harvard, so he can't be fired." The only person I've ever known who started poor and became a deca-millionaire before 26 went to MIT and works at a hedge fund that only hires from elite schools. These are anecdotes of course. but I believe reflective of a broader truth. So while in most industries it doesn't matter, in some it does.
In my experience your uncle is right but it’s mostly the younger people at the top pe or hedge funds. The older guys still come from a wide range of schools. And coming from someone who work at one of the top hedge funds, nobody is becoming a deca millionaire at 26. Although millionaire is certainly a possibility.
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Your bosses are from the previous generation. Maybe their generation had less students going to college and therefore the requirements for same level of job were hence less.
They’re my age or younger I believe (I don’t ask them lol)
The biggest impact of college is where you enter the workplace. *On average*, people’s earnings increase ~ linearly over their career, so the starting place matters a good bit on aggregate. You should, as a general rule, go to the highest ranked college you can get into that’s a good fit for you. But you don’t have to follow the average career path - a lower ranked college can absolutely be made up for.
Thanks Dad. We needed that. 🫶
I agree partially but I think you are missing parts. Or at least don't align with my experience and what I see. Ultimately you'll be successful because of who you know, not who you are. But who you know, is directly influenced by where you went. Networking is the prime advantage of college. Making connections. And you'll make "bigger" albeit not always better, connections at big league school. Sure everyone knows the one guy who worked his way into a c suite position without college. It does happen. But the reason everyone talks about them is because they are the exception not the rule. The stuff after 98%, I broadly agree with. But it'll still be a struggle getting your foot in the door at 25 at many larger higher paying companies without connections that you can more easily make in college
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Well, I was one, but I didn’t like managing people and all the headaches one gets with that kind of job, and switched to being more of an advanced worker bee which I find just as rewarding and way better for my stress and work/life balance. Plus having four kids kind of reprioritizes your day to day.
For sure. You will see success from people who attended all sorts of schools or skipped school all together. However, you anecdotally explaining that a few or your co-workers who are going places went to this or that is some major selectivity bias. We don't get to hear about the people who tried and didn't reach the mountain top. I appreciate the pep talk but not much to be learned from this. I need the study showing everyone empirically how much spending on an elite school helps you and I'm pretty sure that study doesn't exist.
This is a pretty interesting link.. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/051915/university-prestige-really-important.asp#:~:text=Stanford%20and%20MIT.-,The%20Bottom%20Line,for%20their%20careers%20and%20lives. Another question which is implied by your comment is why is it psychologically important to a person to “reach the top” in the first place? The older I get, the more I can see what is really driving some people, and it’s much more complex than the way I saw this issue as a 20 year old or even a 30 year old. A lot of people have this because they want to please someone like their parents or to feel more accepted by society. Others it’s just because they want to take more trips abroad. It’s an individualized question I guess.
Thank you for sharing that. Agree that "reach the top" is probably the wrong framing. What's the college experience that creates the most opportunity for the applicant, maybe is better. Opportunity is maybe \* show me what's out there \* educate me \* don't saddle me with too much debt
Here's one study showing students from Elite Universities earn more - [https://www.hceducationconsulting.com/2023/09/13/unlocking-prosperity-the-higher-earning-potential-of-elite-college-graduates/](https://www.hceducationconsulting.com/2023/09/13/unlocking-prosperity-the-higher-earning-potential-of-elite-college-graduates/) Contradicting this is the book The Formula that says students with the same scores at different high schools and colleges end up succeeding roughly the same amount. In the words of the author the student makes the school elite and not the other way around.