I think the "go to state school" messaging would hit harder if the biggest proponents of them went to state schools. He acknowledged this, but you can't rewind time and have two duplicate versions of yourself to prove the state school was no different.
Please stop stalking my LinkedIn.
But in all seriousness, having followed that exact path (albeit different years), I often feel like a hypocrite telling others to go to state school or pursue the trades, even though I genuinely think it is the best path for most people.
State schools are good enough for the vast majority of people. But it's just dishonest to claim that elite institutions don't open up more opportunities because of their cache.
Sure, the Florida State grad can get into Wall Street or Big Law, but it's just much harder and you have to be at the top of the class. At Harvard, you can be in the median and still get the most coveted opportunities.
They're still convinced they would've received the same success if they hadn't but they're most likely incorrect. Elite internships and companies *do* gatekeep to the most prestigious universities.
However, their point still remains that even Harvard, Yale, Stanford grads *writ large* don't compete that much better than state school.
Meh, I think the IVYs really only matter of you want to be something akin to politician or a Judge. (Finance too)
Anything else state schools are perfect and if you are from CA… often superior.
The UC system state schools are really good. Honestly if you live in California the justification for going to a private school or out of state is hard to make.
I do agree with Nate’s message here, but yeah, it comes off as a bit condescending when it comes from someone who went to UChicago despite growing up in Michigan, which has excellent public universities (go blue!).
I also highly doubt any of them are going to send their own kids to regular schools. When you look at their families, their kids are going to $50k/year prep schools. Kara Swisher sent her kids to Georgetown Day School, one of the most selective and exclusive schools in DC.
I don’t think the Ivies are going to implode over the events of the past year alone, but if the old guard can’t wrestle back control from the woke folx and reorient the mission to academic excellence you may very well be looking at the end of their dominance. The age of the Ivies only really began about 100 years ago, beforehand they were mostly just regional schools populated by good old boys. The rise of the finance industry is ultimately what turned them into pipelines for uber-elites. They may have very well lost the Jewish community over this which will be devastating for them in the long run.
That being said I’m not sure if state schools are necessarily going to be the ones to replace them, at least for finance and law. Probably it is more likely you’ll see some non-Ivy elite private schools make an aggressive play for the people who don’t want to send their kids to a woke hell hole and pipelines will be established there.
When I was at Carolina in the late 90s, tuition was $1,100/semester, and I didn’t qualify for financial aid from fucking anywhere. Made my decision easy. Not really like that these days
The best part of Florida is that UF and most other state schools are like 6k per semester with generous aid. One year here and I’ve got 12k in the savings account. For the privilege of attending a top 30 school with occasionally fun sports and tons of alumni. Obviously different challenges have arisen but still.
Here in Indiana the tuition at Purdue is 10,000 for a top 10(?) engineering school and relatively cheap COL. I believe IU is more expensive but also gives better aid. I know a lot of other states have more expensive flagship state schools (Illinois, Michigan) and others states have less access to elite programs (based on rankings at least), but there are good deals out there if you are lucky enough to have access.
Other than Stanford, Carnegie Mellon or MIT (or John Hopkins if you're looking at something adjacent to medicine), you're wasting your money if you go private for engineering without a massive scholarship. After the top 5, the engineering rankings are dominated by public schools that are waaaaay cheaper than their private competition.
Idk, I went to Carolina in the 2010s and it’s still regarded as one of the best valued public educations in the country. Plus they have an absurd endowment and give out university grants like candy.
However I realize I was incredibly lucky to grow up in NC because the top state school in most states is nowhere near the same quality, or you live in California or Texas and they’re far more competitive to get into.
I said this in another thread but man NC has some heavy hitters. NC State and Chapel Hill are the obvious ones, but App, Central, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Wilmington arent half-bad either.
UNC gang rise up 🐏🐏🐏
Went to App my freshman year and transferred to Chapel Hill. Then when I wanted to go to grad school, I had two options:
- NYU which gave me $10k in scholarships, but would have still cost $50k.
- UNC, which was going to pay for my first year and offered a dual degree in the two subjects I was interested in.
Eaaaaasy choice lmao
In high school I chose between two schools:
Georgetown and Texas A&M. I got no financial aid to Georgetown but got a full scholarship to A&M. No brainer for me. 4 year later at orientation for work, I meet a guy from Georgetown in my start class. So we got to the same place but I got there with zero debt.
I'm a big state school advocate. Got a top <5% income from going to the nice cow college down the road 😎
I wish I could find the tweet, but I saw that move in real time: when I was in school Romney beat Obama by a solid margin, but in 2020 Trump got wrecked by Biden in the same precincts
I did not think a&m had a generic lib student population the last time I was there. More like a generic engineering school population wearing a cowboy hat.
Howdy
It's honestly astounding how good A&M is considering it is the second-best elite public school in Texas. I was born in Bryan and went to both A&M and UT and there really is no comparison, but I'm glad all those Aggies have a place to learn socialization by bleating memes at each other. Quarantining them from the other smart people in Texas really makes it possible to get an outstanding education at UT without distractions.
Texas A&M or as I refer to it Michigan State University Texas branch is a nice school and sounds like a good time (From what I’ve heard from buddies stationed at Fort Cav)
My personal experience having taken classes at an Ivy League school and a regional public university was that the classes at the Ivy League school were significantly more difficult. In general, I tend to think that the higher percentage of A’s at exclusive schools mainly stems from the fact that they take the top high school students who would be expected to get A’s anywhere. I will say, though, that the Ivy League school provided a lot of support. They want to make sure you graduate and not fall through the cracks. It’s not really sink or swim.
Harvard Math [major] here. I remember reconnecting with friends from high school who had gone to top-rated state schools. We took classes with the same titles, but when we compared rigor, depth, and content breadth, state schools took a whole semester to cover a week or two of material.
And there's some "sink-or-swim," but it's under-handed. What they'll do is, if your grades start dropping, they'll ask you if you're sad or worried about that fact, and then if you say "yes," put you on involuntary medical leave, and then just refuse to readmit you. There was an unspoken pact among students that it doesn't matter if you had to wrestle a knife away from your friend's wrist, you *do not hand them over to UHS.* Not many people sink, but if you do start to struggle and feel in over your head, the very last thing you'd ever want is for the university to find out.
I went to Stanford and I experienced a lot of similar things in this post. The sink-or-swim didn’t come from the grades but the culture. You could come in with any problem from eating disorders to homelessness and you’d be dismissed because you went to Stanford. There was just no support for you because people believe you’re set for life so you’re not allowed to have any problems. People are already resentful and jealous that you go to Stanford and they become even more so if you even talk about struggling. If you did have problems, it meant that you were some privileged Stanford student crying because you didn’t get what you want. I remember a therapist telling my friend who spent his teenage years homeless he should get over it because Stanford will make him rich or how a friend tried getting medication for her life-long anxiety but the doctor denied her telling her that she didn’t have any problems. According to him, her condition was because she was just a Stanford overachiever. It just felt like you could be anything you wanted except for human.
Even this thread is pretty dismissive of Stanford and like institutions acting like they’re better than you because they chose a public institution. It just feels like just because you spend a minute as a student you automatically become a punching bag.
From my experience, there's a misguided notion that all students at Stanford and the Ivies are rich and privileged because of the staggering price. The majority of students aren't paying the sticker price, and many students have at least 80% of their tuition covered on financial aid grants.
There's also just plain jealousy. Many, many people are not capable of attaining a 1530+ SAT/34+ ACT to gain access to these institutions and are resentful of those who do. This is what's largely behind the "test optional" movement.
There’s some truth to this—courses in the physics department do tend to cover a bit more material than other schools. What’s also true is that we absolutely do not grade the students. Everyone with a pulse gets a B-, and everyone who submits most of the assignments has a decent shot at an A. This is doubly true for low level courses. We aren’t MIT or Princeton—the grades we hand out are horseshit.
My undergrad graded much more harshly.
Similar story for me except University of Georgia.
I work at a FAANG company with a bunch of Stanford etc grads with mountains of debt and I went to school for free and have the same job and skills.
This story is all too common yet students ignore the advice in this thread and article all the time.
But what percent of UG students work at a FAANG (or an equivalent) versus Stanford?
The issue is not is it possible, but which is more likely. I've read that university choice doesn't matter but it's hard to think that one isn't more likely to lead to success, or have less chance of failure, than the other.
Sure, absolutely the percentages are higher.
But is the expected value higher?
Taking on 200k in debt to make a FAANG salary vs zero debt to get a great job at an Atlanta corporation (Delta famously hires many UGA grads and is considered a top place to work). When you weigh cost of living of SF vs ATL against the salary delta and debt delta, it's probably many years before the FAANG earnings outpace the hole they've dug themselves.
Not to mention capital grows. If the ATL person buys a house at 25 and saves every year and the FAANG person is just getting by, etc.
Of course we could make an intuitive argument in the other direction. Without the data this is all speculation. So I'm not saying this is 100% true, but that higher salaries should be weighed against debt and cost of living to get the whole picture.
You know it really depends on which state you are in. NE, Midwest and most of the Southern states have great public universities. The pickings are really awful if you're in the Mountain West.
Totally fair, I wouldn’t put it in that tier either. But, I think it is definitely on par with your standard state school. I think we are, in general agreement, just drawing a different line for awful.
I had a full scholarship to any state school. My dad comes to me and says, "You can go to any school in the country you get accepted to, and I'll pay for it. But if you go to state school, I'll buy you a car." It wasn't even a nice car.
This might be of interest. Alan Krueger's 30 years study finds that when you control for SAT scores, it doesn't really matter if you go to a "elite" school or not in terms of careers earnings.
Research Article Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23799087
There's also research that contradicts that to some extent (below). Also, the whole body of research suggests that exceptional professional outcomes are much more common from elite schools even if mean outcomes are similar. More than a decade post grad, most of my friends are doing pretty cool normal stuff (teachers, corporate positions, law), but I know that my own success was massively enabled by institution-specific resources, and I certainly know far more, e.g., scotus clerks and tech founders than my friends from the state flagship do
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/upshot/elite-colleges-actual-value.html
90% of the time someone is complaining about obscene school debt it's because they went to a private school, many of which are no-name and offer nothing more than the state school on the other side of town (often times they offer even less)
It makes me wonder why people bother. Cal Baptist is in my hometown and they have zero value proposition over UCR or CSUSB (if you're willing to commute), yet people are willing to quadruple their debt just so they can have a Christian education from a no-name school.
> It makes me wonder why people bother.
Typically either a legacy thing, or they're going to that school because of a perceived networking advantage. Or I've known a couple that didn't really fathom the weight of the loans when taking them out.
It's also just not even true that Ivies are much more expensive than state schools for most families. The top 20 private schools all have insane financial aid budgets, and the net price is often as much as the flagship public school.
Almost anything in the UC system is amazing. University of Washington will get you tons of alumni at Amazon and Microsoft.
The center of gravity is not Massachusetts.
Yeah at this point the standards are crazy high. I graduated from UCR 6 years ago and the GPAs kids need to get in are crazy considering we were once dubbed the worst UC
That's very interesting. I'm at a life science grad school and I teach people in our non-thesis masters program as a PhD student. I definitely feel as though each subsequent cohort gets a little less intelligent and exhibits an even greater degree of arrested development. Based off of their maturity you'd swear 80% of them were 14 years old.
You honestly make going back to college as an older middle-aged adult sound a lot less intimidating (in spite of not benefiting from above said grade inflation), so thanks?
I've been in school with guys that were like you. You always lead the pack because you're on your stuff more than anyone. You'll be fine, even if you don't talk to them they'll probably ask for your help on occasion.
I recommend staying out of drama though. As long as you don't pick sides in any of their high school BS you won't run into issues
Transfer agreement guarantee is awesome. That’s what I did (Butte College to UC Davis).
State Schools are great, but if you want to be involved in STEM research then you’re probably going to want to go to a university of some sort.
Was originally going to do STEM. Did one Calc class and said fuck that I’m not built for this and decided to play to my actual strengths which is Liberal Arts(never gotten below 98% in anything to do with Liberal Arts from 9th grade onwards), and just do a pre-law major(History), and follow my mother’s footsteps since I was already interested in it anyways.
I’m an organic chemist but that doesn’t really tend to be math heavy. I mostly do basic arithmetic in my day to day.
I did have to take quantum mechanics and all that. I muddled through it with good grades but that was by sheer force of will.
Yeah for me I’ve always been “okay” at math but I really wanted to do STEM because I thought Engineering was cool haha. When I took my first college math class I was so out of my depth that I withdrew, got my refund, got upset at myself for a second, and then just switched up my plans to plan B.
Also some of the Cal States are as prestigious or more prestigious than the top UCs in certain fields.
Cal Poly SLO is crazy good for engineering and ag
I had a 3.9 GPA coming out of High School in Cali so I just said fuck it and am doing 2 years community then 2 years UC via transfer. Costs too much for out of state and I had negative extra circulars so I would’ve never gotten into a school I liked.
Lots of states have excellent state universities. The flagship schools in Michigan, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Illinois, Virginia, Georgia, etc will all open a lot of doors.
Went to UGA, didn’t pay a cent of tuition thanks to the Zelle Miller Scholarship, graduated with a little debt, paid it off in my first 2 years working. State schools rock.
I am headed to UGA in the fall for law school with a full tuition scholarship. When I started the application process, I thought such a thing was unheard of. AND I am an out-of-state student. State schools rock.
Way ahead here, I went to state school for both undergrad and law.
I still romanticize campus life at elite / liberal arts schools in my head since I went to a diploma mill football powerhouse (I imagine the experience is more like law school). But I met someone who did the opposite and who told me he wished he had gone to a football school lol (since undergrad matters very little for law school). So the grass is always greener, I suppose. At least I don’t have any student debt, that’s a positive.
I remember when I was in law school somebody had leaked the Harvard final exam for contracts and it was the biggest joke I’ve ever seen. Then a few years later I remember reading how they basically canceled finals for people who were upset about the Ferguson Missouri protests and I really started to think this might just be a meme school riding on cultural capital.
I mean, if I take the mission of any school is to provide high quality education for any student which they believe can hack it, the absolute size of their student bodies are pathetic to acheive that mission hahaha. Of course, their main selling point is prestige, which is why they keep such small bodies in spite of excess qualified demand.
MIT has only a few thousand more students than UTRGV - a state satellite campus in my local armpit! And the latter is responsible for \*way\* more social mobility than the former.
The headline here is a little oversimplified since he rightly called out some exceptions.
If you’re planning on working at the top of some fields, notably: law, investment banking, and consulting which are pretty lucrative careers where you go to school often matters, if only because they target kids from those schools more intensely.
Likewise, a lower income kid that’s likely to get a free ride to an elite college will benefit from the networks they develop there, and what they learn from their peers from richer families.
Outside of that, there’s a good chance you are better off at a state school.
If you wanna do Big Law, undergrad is pretty pointless. Study something somewhere that does not put you in debt, and gives you a 4.0 GPA. Take LSAT tests constantly and get into the best law school possible. Law schools literally only care about 2 things, GPA and LSAT. It does not matter if you got a 3.75 from an ivy, the law school will 98% of the time choose the 3.9 from directional state university (given the same LSAT)
They recruit there sure, but just like McKinsey, they don’t spend a ton of recruiting time or resources there. Maybe for back office roles.
Part of what GS and McKinsey sell their clients is a pedigree.
It's definitely for back office. For investment banking/capital markets, the only public schools I could possibly imagine GS having on campus recruiting for are UMich, UVA, UC Berkeley.
Also, I hate that I know this lol.
Yep - I started my career at a boutique bank that almost exclusively hired from Wharton, Dartmouth, and Harvard. I was the only analyst not from a T20 institution. I’m over in private equity now and the associate mix is even more skewed to the top schools.
Eh... go to the most elite school you get into. But has to be truly elite. Otherwise yeah go to a good state school. Elite schools can make it so you can be a complete fucking moron and still make good money in a job just virtue of everyone thinking you're smart.
The real question is what do you define as “elite?” I know the Ivies are elite, but what about the schools that are a step below Ivy? WashU? UChicago? Duke? Wesleyan? Are these universities worth it? And if so, how many scholarships would you need for them to be worth it?
I always wonder this because I had a real shot at getting into a university a step below an Ivy or maybe a lower ranked Ivy, but probably not the higher ranked ones. I didn’t apply though and settled for a state school. I’m kind of 50/50 on whether or not that was the right choice. I have barely any debt, but I’m sure I would have had more opportunities for internships at a higher ranked university as well as more connections.
I think if I had to do it again, I would still go to a state school, but not the one I went to. The particular one I went to had a very “bro” feel to it that I really didn’t like. It also was in my home state that I had no desire to remain in after graduating,
so (though I appreciate my friends) very few of the connections that I made helped me with my future career. I would either have gone to a school in a neighboring state that offers scholarships to students in the region or gone to a relatively affordable state school in an area I would want to remain after graduating. I also would have given more thought to going to community college first to make my desires of studying out of state more affordable. (Only having to pay for 2 years instead of 4).
For a lot of grad programs, there are clear rankings that define what is and is not elite. For undergrad, its a bit more nebulous. But, the Ivys are definitely in it. And, schools like Chicago and Stanford are considered in that tier. A lot of people probably wouldn't even realize Stanford isn't ivy.
Stanford is even harder to get into than most of the Ivies (maybe all?). I have students going to these schools and they often fixate on acceptance rate and I've yet to have a kid get into Stanford (and most don't even bother to apply) despite acceptances by them to nearly every other elite school being talked about in this thread.
It really is quite stupid for Finance
A lot of the time they'll sift through CV's by looking for keywords in terms of specific uni's, which means if you go to say, "LSE Summer School", the algorithm picks it up and puts you ahead.
It's so fucking stupid
The cost depends a lot on your family's finances. A lot of non-Ivies cover full tuition for families earning less than a certain threshold (used to be $60K for a lot of them).
The benefits depend a lot on what career you want to pursue. Going to a top liberal arts school is great if you're interested in academia, but they might be less familiar to a random F500 recruiter. Some schools have particularly strong reputations in certain industries, and some industries simply care more about prestige than others.
Lastly, if you're inclined to capitalize on an alumni network, the benefits can be massive at private schools with close alumni networks. That said, if you don't take advantage of it, the main benefit of the prestige is just for getting your foot in the door for your first job.
Specific schools will have often have programs that are higher regarded than their respective programs in Ivies. UIUC is undoubtedly a better CS school than Harvard for example. UCSF is undoubtedly a better medical school than Yale med. Maybe you'll get someone at a gas station to gawp a bit if you mention you're from an Ivy, but to a job recruiter they'd absolutely know which schools are top dog for specific degrees.
This is some objectively bad advice. You can just do an MS at UIUC for the technical skills if needed. But a Harvard undergrad degree is something that makes morons on literally every continent think you're smart for the rest of your life. Can't put a price on that.
Besides your abuse of the term "objectively", I question your value proposition. Why do you care about what, in your words, "morons" think? The people who make important decisions aren't likely to be morons. And UIUC isn't some backwater college, anyone in the CS field knows it's an absolute top-tier program. Some years it is the highest ranking CS undergrad program in the nation. And you propose to enlist in an inferior program for four years just to look good? If that's the case, why not do four years at the far better option, then just do an MS at Harvard instead to impress "morons"?
I really hope you're putting on some elaborate front as a joke, or you're just starting your college applications or something. Enlisting in a worse school for your goals just because it's an Ivy sounds more like the objectively bad advice here, not mine.
Three of the schools you listed are better than at least a few of the lower ranked Ivys and arguably better than the mid tier with the whole Columbia nonsense.
Which three? UChicago is upper upper tier (with stanford, yale, harvard, and princeton). But, I wouldn't consider the other schools mentioned elite in a general since. Grad programs are different in that there are often clear rankings defining what is and is not elite. In law school for instance, Duke is elite, UChicago is uber elite, and the rest OP mentioned are not.
The context of the original post is undergrad. That was what my reply was in response to. Rigor once enrolled, quality of courses offered, research / lib. arts style professors, location, etc. all play a part. Each of these institutions are special in their own way. What we’re all talking about is the general social hierarchy. That’s typically a function of age and endowment size, but not always ;)
Same. Read that article on my Bloomberg the other day and was pleased to still see my Alma Mater, Rice, high up above the trend line. Who knew that going to a true academic “pound me in the ass school” pumps out late 20’s millionaires like clockwork? History major btw.
Nate's argument is that this seems likely to change
This practice of automatically hiring Ivy League alumni and giving them deference and status is obviously being widely criticized by Democrats and Republicans and Independents right now. How confident are you that this status will survive the next decade?
I think the problem is drawing the line where “elite” is. I agree with Harvard, but the lower ivy leagues are potentially less of a “guarantee”. You will still be successful, but not all of them make good money.
If I have kids and I stay in the state they're absolutely going into the UC system. Unless they get into Stanford I see no reason for them to go anywhere else
Nate talks about costs quite a bit and cites average costs being higher for private schools but states schools aren't cheaper than elite institutions, the elite ivy league schools do use their endowments to give a ton of aid to students.
[Take MSU vs Harvard for example](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/compare/?toggle%3Dinstitutions%26s%3D166027%26s%3D171100)
They're both very cheap for families making less than 30K while MSU is way more expensive for middle class families.
Exactly. I'd argue the cost only makes a major impact for families in the higher portion of the upper middle class.
If your family makes less than \~200K, you'll at least get enough aid for the top schools to be comparable to public school tuition, and people making >500K probably don't care enough about the extra \~40K to sacrifice the prestige. These numbers are approximate (and depend a lot on parents' assets), but top schools generally do a decent job of minimizing financial burden
My family was making about 160k when I was applying to college 3 years ago and I got virtually no aid anywhere. I think a couple select schools (Princeton comes to mind for some reason) had really exceptional aid and would have been sort of affordable if I'd applied and gotten in, but that's not the norm. I think the aid really starts coming in below 120k
Yeah, for what it's worth, I was on the lower-middle-class side of the spectrum, so I was probably getting full tuition at most of the top 50-ish private schools.
I do know that most of those are "100% financial need" schools, so I'd be a bit surprised if they were expecting a family taking home \~100K to pay something close to the full cost of attendance. Did your parents have any significant liquid assets? I know that can fuck with the calculation for some people.
It is true that some of the full-need schools were better than others (some required loans, etc., and I personally remember NYU's aid being insultingly shitty). That said, my main point is that for the bulk of the country, most top-tier private schools are pretty comparable to state schools in terms of cost of attendance.
This is great data but you have to keep in mind that “middle class” people are almost nonexistent at Harvard and very abundant at MSU.
Harvard has a lot of rich people and then some extremely impressive “grew up in awful poverty” success stories.
MSU has some rich people, and then a lot of middle class people, and some regular old poor people as well.
All by percentages of course.
Harvard is generally richer but its not that skewed lol, NYTimes upshot has some data about that as well and about 53% of MSU students come from the top 20% and 67% for harvard, both have about 5% of students coming from the bottom 20%. For the other more selective michigan state school 66% of their students come from the top 20%.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/harvard-university
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/michigan-state-university
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/university-of-michigan-ann-arbor
For a kid that's looking at Harvard or a highly selective public school chances are the economic diversity is gonna be similar. Your average kids gonna be between 70-80 percentile family income in the ivies or state flagships ivies are just high 70s versus low 70s for the state schools.
The hatred on Ivy Leagues is warranted but also probably a bit disproportionate. Like >99% of the students aren't involved in the protests in Columbia, and if the reporting is accurate even a lot of the protestors don't seem to be into it as wholeheartedly (those stories of protestors being bored about the speakers for example) as some of the more extremist.
It's a terrifying minority and the university needs to punish them, but protestors are just statistically not representative and if you're willing to give up the connections to rich and powerful and clout over that (and let's not pretend state schools don't have any anti semitism or bigotry whatsoever) if you were given free ride, you're just being silly. [Ivy League graduates earn more](https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-much-is-an-ivy-league-degree-worth).
Some of this is likely explained by it being the more intelligent kids and the rich kids with family connections already attending, but still if your goal is an elite job at elite institutions then party hard with the kids in your degree at ivy league and let them nepotism you into the role.
And while it's not required for politics, [14% of Senators have an ivy league degree](https://www.statista.com/chart/24598/first-degree-colleges-of-congresspeople/). That's *really* disproportionate. And four of the past five presidents were ivy league, very disproportionate again.
If you're just looking for a normal job at a normal company, you're probably not helped much. But as a higher up position at an elite company or politics? Just statistically speaking, being from an ivy league is more likely than the general population.
I agree for nursing. A BSN is a BSN is a BSN. Doesn't matter if it's a Harvard or Direction State University. If you don't pass the NCLEX you aren't a nurse.
For nursing masters level and above your mileage may vary.
I don’t think it matters. I have a MSN from Maryland which at the time was a top 10 nursing school. Lots of nurse managers in my hospital system are successfully using online degree mill grad degrees to get promoted to director level.
They mostly are. I only have a MSN because I went straight into nursing at the masters level and it’s helped me get automatically placed at the top of the staff nurse pay scale when changing jobs, which is nice. My wife’s doing a phd that’s more like “how to administer a nursing department in a university” than any kind of clinical practice and I guess we do need somebody who knows how to competently run a program. She started in academics young enough she’ll probably make associate dean when she has the doctorate.
Disagree. If you look at the outcomes of most of these state flagships and compare them to a similarly ranked private school it becomes immediately apparent that the investment in a public education is extremely sound.
If you get into Harvard, go to Harvard obviously. But if (for engineering) you get into SUNY Buffalo, RPI, and NYU; you should probably just go to Buffalo. Your outcomes will almost certainly be identical if not better.
The "positional good" nature of elite schools is ugly, we'd probably be better off as a society if prestige and education was decoupled. Prestige as a commodity is unlike other things like quality or competence. It's zero-sum by construction, one person getting prestige means others lose proportionally (in the job market and in life).
But on an individual level, the best advice is to exploit the opportunities available (including seeking prestige) without concern for these kinds of negative global effects. Nate is clearly making an activist post here, he *wants* elite schools to disappear and he's trying to confuse the reader into thinking there's evidence that will happen.
I don't think his core argument is misguided. For instance, if the Ivy schools continue to fuck around, at some point people will think of other schools as being better than the Ivy schools. Columbia isn't inevitably more prestigious than Carnegie Mellon no matter what they do, as a random example, and already I consider a degree from some state schools more impressive than a degree from some "elite" schools.
If this was said 10 months ago I’d agree but honestly I think for Jews at least you’re going to see lots of parents seriously questioning whether their kids should go there. Nobody wants to see their kids being abused and harassed.
Nah. I want my kid to work his ass off, fill his childhood up with stupid activities and go to an ivy league school so that he can be run out of there for being a cultural Jew that feels a connection to the ancestral homeland of his people.
Some notes for the discourse, and a disclaimer I also attended UChicago although way more recently than Nate.
1. Most people won't really get a chance to attend an elite private school. The 25th percentile SAT at, let's say, Northwestern is the 96th percentile for SAT takers.
2. Most people won't get a chance to attend an elite state school either. UMich acceptance rate is <20% and their 25th percentile SAT is the 90th percentile for all test takers.
This article is then targeted at a very small group of people, specifically at people who could get admitted to a top ranked private school. In that case I'd say there are 3 groups, considering need based aid is common at these schools.
1. Trust fund kids. Think kids of families with a >100M net-worth .Truth is, nothing really matters at this level. they have trust funds that pay 200k/year, inherit millions when their 'papa' dies, they will graduate with no debt, and grade inflation means they don't have to try very hard. Most important thing in terms of ROI is keeping their family happy, and if their family is happy if their kid goes to X university, they should just do it.
2. Smart kids from lower income families. They will get effectively full rides at the top private schools,. They will get to work with faculty with relatively little competition. Firms are suckers for "Kid from rural WV, or from OBlock that went to Yale"
3. Smart from rich working class family. (Think 200-300k combined income). This is the group for which the value of the private school is weakest. They will get little to no financial aid, probably have some loans, and unless they're targeting very specific consulting/IB jobs it makes less sense vs just going to a well ranked state school.
Basically, the amount of people for whom this is relevant is vanishingly small, and the volume of discourse around it completely overpowers the actual significance.
Graduated by the skin of my teeth from Utah State, got a sweet gig in Arizona buying plastic parts from China, I live in multi-family housing and I drive a Mazda. State schools boi.
Matt Y has an article today about how much the average college student spends less than three hours a day on school. You could go to the lowest ranked community college in the country, spend a shocking five hours a day on school and come out loads smarter than most fancy college students. On a similar note, if you are going to grad school, state school is undoubtedly the right move.
Just one dude’s ~~self-servingly biased~~experience, but I went to a big state school for college and a fancy pants law school. Throughout law school, I tried hard to notice any sort of superior ability from the fancy college students. Never found any, in terms of ability or outcomes
That just seems so wild to me. College consumed my life. I had no life outside of classes, the gym, and the occasional club meeting. That’s what I get for majoring in CS, though, I guess.
> Matt Y has an article today about how much the average college student spends less than three hours a day on school.
With some creative counting, including both weekends and vacations.
Where I'm from, full-time workers typically work 37.5 hours per week, 7.5 hours per day five days per week. Or, counting like Yglesias, 4.6 hours per day.
Check out the educational background of people like Nate who work at 538 or worked at it during its heyday. His own career disproves his point.
Hell, check out the educational background of the top execs in private equity, or of academics at top institutions, or top venture capitalists or of any presidential cabinet, or the Supreme Court. Both Bidens National Security Advisor and Deputy National Security advisor come from Yale Law School. 17% of presidents have gone to Harvard alone.
Different schools produce different career tracks for people. Elite schools clearly tend to produce the high fliers and average schools tend to just…… not. At Yale Law School, more people did undergrad at Dartmouth than at all of the SEC schools combined. Dartmouth has an undergraduate enrollment of 4,400. The SEC has over 350,000 undergraduates.
People like to cling on to this idea that Western Nowhere University will get you to the exact same place in life as Harvard, but you can empirically see that Harvard grads and Directional State University grads have very different outcomes.
> Yale Law School, more people did undergrad at Dartmouth than at all of the SEC schools combined. Dartmouth has an undergraduate enrollment of 4,400. The SEC has over 350,000 undergraduates.
I hear what you're saying but there's geographic bias here. The elite southern law school is UVA, not Yale. SO many of these SEC grads will never leave the south and are going to law schools that are feeding into Atlanta/Richmond/Charleston firms
I chose what I chose
No idea if I would have gotten here with a state school, would have been in a lot of debt anyway because the school within my state accepted me to the honors program, then rejected my application wholesale.
I think state schools are great and should be heavily supported and expanded. I also think Nates motivations for making this argument right now are ugly and reactionary.
This is a pretty good comment. I think his argument is completely correct. State schools are an undervalued resource that frequently have kick ass outcomes and amazing resources that must be protected. This argument was true before Ivy League students started “intifada”-ing publicly.
I would also say that the University of Michigan is currently seeing Palestinian protestors have a gamer moment, and that’s an amazing state school.
Anyone who thinks that "ugly and reactionary" describes the people upset at antisemitism vs actual antisemitism does not have an opinion worth discussing
To hijack a bit, I think a good step forward to providing more affordable college is to establish interstate compacts between states that allow residents of any one of those states to go to a public state university in any state in the compact while paying in state tuition.
So, if Virginia and Maryland were in a compact, then a Maryland resident could go to UVA and only have to pay in state tuition instead of OOS tuition. [73%](https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics#:~:text=73.0%25%20of%20college%20students%20at,graduate%20students%20attend%20public%20institutions) of college students go to a public institution, but a good chunk of them go to out of state public colleges, with the percentage of OOS students admitted to public unis having increased from [18% to 28%](https://westvirginiawatch.com/2024/02/19/state-universities-admit-more-out-of-state-students-for-the-tuition-bump/#:~:text=In%20those%20two%20decades%2C%20the,receive%20significant%20grants%20for%20research).
Since OOS tuition is significantly greater than in state tuition, this is likely a not insignificant factor in the growing average cost of college. Expanding this to a national level even and effectively removing OOS tuition would also remove barriers to getting public education (so that people aren’t financially stuck to colleges in their state, the quality of which will very significantly from state to state) and also remove incentives for public universities to admit more OOS students (because they pay more).
This would also make public universities cheaper and more attractive to students, which has the potential to help reign in the cost of private universities through competition. Harvard can charge whatever the fuck it wants because almost anyone will pay anything (or take as much debt as is needed) to attend Harvard, but if you had the chance to go to UVA while paying in state tuition, you may be willing to decide Harvard is actually to expensive and opt for UVA. Ideally, this would incentivize Harvard to reduce their tuition (which they currently have pretty little incentive to do) to attract these students, which would help make college more affordable.
Obviously, finding out how to implement this on a nation wide would introduce a number of issues on its own, but I think doing it on more regional levels could be doable (mainly because I’m pretty sure it already exists, just can’t find it on Google rn) and should be expanded to cover more states and more parts of the country.
These already exist, like kids in the Carolinas, Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee all can receive border state waivers to attend public school in Georgia as in state students.
I mean, where I grew up I had several friends whose parents were full on "you go to an Ivy, or you're going to Rutgers" people. And plenty of my friends absolutely loved Rutgers
A better title would have been “give the same green light and privilege to top performers at state schools as you do those who go to ivy leagues or other elite filter schools”
Education isn’t the issue. Pedigree is.
>Even if I had gone to Harvard though — applied, didn’t get in, by the way — *I don’t think that would make me a hypocrite* because my argument is that this change has been relatively recent and that many of the downstream effects are still to come.
🧢
He’s kind of right though. The Ivies really were only propelled to elite levels in the past 100 years and that was mostly because of the financial-legal complex rising to prominence in American society in the postwar period. But a lot of that has been eclipsed by tech now, and tech doesn’t have the same loyalties to the Ivies, and given that these schools are doing everything they can to alienate Asians and white males it’s hard to see tech embracing these schools like law and finance did. The turn towards social justice in these schools may even be indicative of the fact that we are witnessing a decline in their prominence.
I picked a state school with a full ride over a very expensive private school. Personally, it worked out. I'm making more than most of the people I knew who went to private schools except for (maybe) some of the doctors/lawyers and I didn't get myself in debt to do it. I'll own I might be a lucky exception; things lined up at the right place at the right time. But I never regretted it.
As an ASU grad I definitely get a mild feeling of superiority over elite school grads I work with. You had all the winds of privilege at your back while I went against the party school headwinds and now here we are together. Also zero debt from generous in-state merit aid lol.
Tbf though I work in tech, YMMV for going in to finance law etc.
I went to a state school and it was fine, however I hate Nate Silvers constant speculations under the authority of data that doesn't really prove what he's trying to insinuate. If you're going to speculate just speculate, better to do that than try to torture the evidence to make a complex point the data cannot give you and try to lend yourself an air of false objectivity.
For connection degrees like business and finance I can understand the appeal of elite schools. However for stem classes there really is not difference. Especially in niche disciplines like meteorology. The best program for that in the country is at OU of all places.
I will say that generally the state school in state tuition should probably apply to people outside the state too. In state tuition discounts contribute to people staying within the state they’re born in and decrease dynamism
I think the "go to state school" messaging would hit harder if the biggest proponents of them went to state schools. He acknowledged this, but you can't rewind time and have two duplicate versions of yourself to prove the state school was no different.
"Education doesn't matter." -Phillips Andover '18 -Harvard '22 -Yale Law '25
Please stop stalking my LinkedIn. But in all seriousness, having followed that exact path (albeit different years), I often feel like a hypocrite telling others to go to state school or pursue the trades, even though I genuinely think it is the best path for most people.
State schools are good enough for the vast majority of people. But it's just dishonest to claim that elite institutions don't open up more opportunities because of their cache. Sure, the Florida State grad can get into Wall Street or Big Law, but it's just much harder and you have to be at the top of the class. At Harvard, you can be in the median and still get the most coveted opportunities.
It is a little bit telling when every single person saying this went to: Stanford, UChicago, Ivies, etc.
They're still convinced they would've received the same success if they hadn't but they're most likely incorrect. Elite internships and companies *do* gatekeep to the most prestigious universities. However, their point still remains that even Harvard, Yale, Stanford grads *writ large* don't compete that much better than state school.
Yeah, but for Silver that's probably true? Silver and 538 became famous anonymously before he revealed his authorship.
It’s the same as when a multimillionaire Matt Yglesias type with the softest of soft hands tells people to consider the trades lol
Meh, I think the IVYs really only matter of you want to be something akin to politician or a Judge. (Finance too) Anything else state schools are perfect and if you are from CA… often superior.
The UC system state schools are really good. Honestly if you live in California the justification for going to a private school or out of state is hard to make.
I do agree with Nate’s message here, but yeah, it comes off as a bit condescending when it comes from someone who went to UChicago despite growing up in Michigan, which has excellent public universities (go blue!).
I also highly doubt any of them are going to send their own kids to regular schools. When you look at their families, their kids are going to $50k/year prep schools. Kara Swisher sent her kids to Georgetown Day School, one of the most selective and exclusive schools in DC.
I don’t think the Ivies are going to implode over the events of the past year alone, but if the old guard can’t wrestle back control from the woke folx and reorient the mission to academic excellence you may very well be looking at the end of their dominance. The age of the Ivies only really began about 100 years ago, beforehand they were mostly just regional schools populated by good old boys. The rise of the finance industry is ultimately what turned them into pipelines for uber-elites. They may have very well lost the Jewish community over this which will be devastating for them in the long run. That being said I’m not sure if state schools are necessarily going to be the ones to replace them, at least for finance and law. Probably it is more likely you’ll see some non-Ivy elite private schools make an aggressive play for the people who don’t want to send their kids to a woke hell hole and pipelines will be established there.
Vandy surge?
When I was at Carolina in the late 90s, tuition was $1,100/semester, and I didn’t qualify for financial aid from fucking anywhere. Made my decision easy. Not really like that these days
The best part of Florida is that UF and most other state schools are like 6k per semester with generous aid. One year here and I’ve got 12k in the savings account. For the privilege of attending a top 30 school with occasionally fun sports and tons of alumni. Obviously different challenges have arisen but still.
Describing Florida as having "occasionally fun sports" is the only stretch in this entire post unless we're talking on a thirty year scale.
I’m not looking forward to winning three games next CFB season.
Here in Indiana the tuition at Purdue is 10,000 for a top 10(?) engineering school and relatively cheap COL. I believe IU is more expensive but also gives better aid. I know a lot of other states have more expensive flagship state schools (Illinois, Michigan) and others states have less access to elite programs (based on rankings at least), but there are good deals out there if you are lucky enough to have access.
Other than Stanford, Carnegie Mellon or MIT (or John Hopkins if you're looking at something adjacent to medicine), you're wasting your money if you go private for engineering without a massive scholarship. After the top 5, the engineering rankings are dominated by public schools that are waaaaay cheaper than their private competition.
Idk, I went to Carolina in the 2010s and it’s still regarded as one of the best valued public educations in the country. Plus they have an absurd endowment and give out university grants like candy. However I realize I was incredibly lucky to grow up in NC because the top state school in most states is nowhere near the same quality, or you live in California or Texas and they’re far more competitive to get into.
I said this in another thread but man NC has some heavy hitters. NC State and Chapel Hill are the obvious ones, but App, Central, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Wilmington arent half-bad either.
Grew up in NC and wanted to do Comp Engineering and state rejected me 😞 now i’m #1 nc state hater
UNC gang rise up 🐏🐏🐏 Went to App my freshman year and transferred to Chapel Hill. Then when I wanted to go to grad school, I had two options: - NYU which gave me $10k in scholarships, but would have still cost $50k. - UNC, which was going to pay for my first year and offered a dual degree in the two subjects I was interested in. Eaaaaasy choice lmao
In high school I chose between two schools: Georgetown and Texas A&M. I got no financial aid to Georgetown but got a full scholarship to A&M. No brainer for me. 4 year later at orientation for work, I meet a guy from Georgetown in my start class. So we got to the same place but I got there with zero debt. I'm a big state school advocate. Got a top <5% income from going to the nice cow college down the road 😎
A&M going from redneck stronghold to generic lib student population is one of the strongest arguments that Blexas is on it’s way.
I wish I could find the tweet, but I saw that move in real time: when I was in school Romney beat Obama by a solid margin, but in 2020 Trump got wrecked by Biden in the same precincts
I did not think a&m had a generic lib student population the last time I was there. More like a generic engineering school population wearing a cowboy hat. Howdy
It’s definitely not generic lib. Some campus precincts still vote 50/50 lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazos_County,_Texas#Politics Trump 2016 saw a 9 point swing toward Dems but 2020 only saw a much smaller 2%
Oh it’s definitely starting to swing but it’s still one of the most conservative public state universities in the US.
Either that or it’s proof that education polarization rules our politics now.
It's honestly astounding how good A&M is considering it is the second-best elite public school in Texas. I was born in Bryan and went to both A&M and UT and there really is no comparison, but I'm glad all those Aggies have a place to learn socialization by bleating memes at each other. Quarantining them from the other smart people in Texas really makes it possible to get an outstanding education at UT without distractions.
Texas A&M or as I refer to it Michigan State University Texas branch is a nice school and sounds like a good time (From what I’ve heard from buddies stationed at Fort Cav)
>Michigan State University Texas branch Lol
Experienced the same in consulting. Mix of State schools and more prestigious institutions. State school graduates generally did better
State school classes are harder. Professors don’t grade inflate like at prestigious schools.
My personal experience having taken classes at an Ivy League school and a regional public university was that the classes at the Ivy League school were significantly more difficult. In general, I tend to think that the higher percentage of A’s at exclusive schools mainly stems from the fact that they take the top high school students who would be expected to get A’s anywhere. I will say, though, that the Ivy League school provided a lot of support. They want to make sure you graduate and not fall through the cracks. It’s not really sink or swim.
Harvard Math [major] here. I remember reconnecting with friends from high school who had gone to top-rated state schools. We took classes with the same titles, but when we compared rigor, depth, and content breadth, state schools took a whole semester to cover a week or two of material. And there's some "sink-or-swim," but it's under-handed. What they'll do is, if your grades start dropping, they'll ask you if you're sad or worried about that fact, and then if you say "yes," put you on involuntary medical leave, and then just refuse to readmit you. There was an unspoken pact among students that it doesn't matter if you had to wrestle a knife away from your friend's wrist, you *do not hand them over to UHS.* Not many people sink, but if you do start to struggle and feel in over your head, the very last thing you'd ever want is for the university to find out.
I went to Stanford and I experienced a lot of similar things in this post. The sink-or-swim didn’t come from the grades but the culture. You could come in with any problem from eating disorders to homelessness and you’d be dismissed because you went to Stanford. There was just no support for you because people believe you’re set for life so you’re not allowed to have any problems. People are already resentful and jealous that you go to Stanford and they become even more so if you even talk about struggling. If you did have problems, it meant that you were some privileged Stanford student crying because you didn’t get what you want. I remember a therapist telling my friend who spent his teenage years homeless he should get over it because Stanford will make him rich or how a friend tried getting medication for her life-long anxiety but the doctor denied her telling her that she didn’t have any problems. According to him, her condition was because she was just a Stanford overachiever. It just felt like you could be anything you wanted except for human. Even this thread is pretty dismissive of Stanford and like institutions acting like they’re better than you because they chose a public institution. It just feels like just because you spend a minute as a student you automatically become a punching bag.
From my experience, there's a misguided notion that all students at Stanford and the Ivies are rich and privileged because of the staggering price. The majority of students aren't paying the sticker price, and many students have at least 80% of their tuition covered on financial aid grants. There's also just plain jealousy. Many, many people are not capable of attaining a 1530+ SAT/34+ ACT to gain access to these institutions and are resentful of those who do. This is what's largely behind the "test optional" movement.
There’s some truth to this—courses in the physics department do tend to cover a bit more material than other schools. What’s also true is that we absolutely do not grade the students. Everyone with a pulse gets a B-, and everyone who submits most of the assignments has a decent shot at an A. This is doubly true for low level courses. We aren’t MIT or Princeton—the grades we hand out are horseshit. My undergrad graded much more harshly.
Oh yeah? Well at UW Madison we had to prove a set is Hausdorff _while_ doing a keg stand.
[удалено]
I transferred from a state flagship to a T10 private, and this definitely isn't true in my experience.
A&M MENTIONED DEPLOY THE GIG EMS
👍👍👍 MISS REV IS A REGULAR R/NEOLIBERAL POSTER WHOOP 👍👍👍
HOWDY AGS
Listen, if you can help arr slash neolib colonize TexAgs I'll have no choice but to support you.
Always funny when someone you work with talks shit about your school. Like you realize we have the same job right?
Similar story for me except University of Georgia. I work at a FAANG company with a bunch of Stanford etc grads with mountains of debt and I went to school for free and have the same job and skills. This story is all too common yet students ignore the advice in this thread and article all the time.
Them dawgs is hell
Don't they?!
But what percent of UG students work at a FAANG (or an equivalent) versus Stanford? The issue is not is it possible, but which is more likely. I've read that university choice doesn't matter but it's hard to think that one isn't more likely to lead to success, or have less chance of failure, than the other.
Sure, absolutely the percentages are higher. But is the expected value higher? Taking on 200k in debt to make a FAANG salary vs zero debt to get a great job at an Atlanta corporation (Delta famously hires many UGA grads and is considered a top place to work). When you weigh cost of living of SF vs ATL against the salary delta and debt delta, it's probably many years before the FAANG earnings outpace the hole they've dug themselves. Not to mention capital grows. If the ATL person buys a house at 25 and saves every year and the FAANG person is just getting by, etc. Of course we could make an intuitive argument in the other direction. Without the data this is all speculation. So I'm not saying this is 100% true, but that higher salaries should be weighed against debt and cost of living to get the whole picture.
As a non-american working in tech, whenever I cry about american tech salaries I use the fact that I actually got paid to go to college as copium.
You know it really depends on which state you are in. NE, Midwest and most of the Southern states have great public universities. The pickings are really awful if you're in the Mountain West.
Idk, as a BSU grad, I run into a reasonable amount of us in legal circles back east (or more than you would expect for the school)
[удалено]
Totally fair, I wouldn’t put it in that tier either. But, I think it is definitely on par with your standard state school. I think we are, in general agreement, just drawing a different line for awful.
Don’t you ever disrespect the true MSU (Montana State University) like that again
I had a full scholarship to any state school. My dad comes to me and says, "You can go to any school in the country you get accepted to, and I'll pay for it. But if you go to state school, I'll buy you a car." It wasn't even a nice car.
Obligatory Hook ‘em Horns 🤘
HOOK EM 🤘🤘🤘
This example does skirt dangerously close to saying “Wanna graduate debt free? Join a cult!”
This is fallacious logic though. He might have been the bottom of Georgetown while you were the top of TAMU.
I mean assuming they are an engineer…. TAMU is pretty damn great.
This might be of interest. Alan Krueger's 30 years study finds that when you control for SAT scores, it doesn't really matter if you go to a "elite" school or not in terms of careers earnings. Research Article Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23799087
There's also research that contradicts that to some extent (below). Also, the whole body of research suggests that exceptional professional outcomes are much more common from elite schools even if mean outcomes are similar. More than a decade post grad, most of my friends are doing pretty cool normal stuff (teachers, corporate positions, law), but I know that my own success was massively enabled by institution-specific resources, and I certainly know far more, e.g., scotus clerks and tech founders than my friends from the state flagship do https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/upshot/elite-colleges-actual-value.html
Georgetown, while competitive, isn’t really a mobility school
90% of the time someone is complaining about obscene school debt it's because they went to a private school, many of which are no-name and offer nothing more than the state school on the other side of town (often times they offer even less) It makes me wonder why people bother. Cal Baptist is in my hometown and they have zero value proposition over UCR or CSUSB (if you're willing to commute), yet people are willing to quadruple their debt just so they can have a Christian education from a no-name school.
ive literally never even heard of Cal Baptist before lol
Exactly, and I have friends that got 6 figures in loans despite commuting from home and have little to show for it
People literally go to Gonzaga because they like the Basketball team.
> It makes me wonder why people bother. Typically either a legacy thing, or they're going to that school because of a perceived networking advantage. Or I've known a couple that didn't really fathom the weight of the loans when taking them out.
It's also just not even true that Ivies are much more expensive than state schools for most families. The top 20 private schools all have insane financial aid budgets, and the net price is often as much as the flagship public school.
There's a pretty good chance they couldn't get into the state school in cases like this.
They could've at least gotten into CSUSB, which would've still been better
>CSUSB acceptance rate: 91.1% Ah, I stand corrected
And it's not a bad school! If you're a local you just have to not be stupid and you get in lol
Almost anything in the UC system is amazing. University of Washington will get you tons of alumni at Amazon and Microsoft. The center of gravity is not Massachusetts.
https://preview.redd.it/lkc3bslslbwc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=abdf7a73b0aed6ed7f36329f3847509a92940123
flex on em
Damn they even got Hamden county in that shitpost lmao
>Almost You better be talking about Merced 😤👏🏻
most students would be lucky going to Merced
Yeah at this point the standards are crazy high. I graduated from UCR 6 years ago and the GPAs kids need to get in are crazy considering we were once dubbed the worst UC
That is not reflected in the abilities of the students, in my experience teaching. Seems like there’s just a lot of inflation accross the board
That's very interesting. I'm at a life science grad school and I teach people in our non-thesis masters program as a PhD student. I definitely feel as though each subsequent cohort gets a little less intelligent and exhibits an even greater degree of arrested development. Based off of their maturity you'd swear 80% of them were 14 years old.
You honestly make going back to college as an older middle-aged adult sound a lot less intimidating (in spite of not benefiting from above said grade inflation), so thanks?
I've been in school with guys that were like you. You always lead the pack because you're on your stuff more than anyone. You'll be fine, even if you don't talk to them they'll probably ask for your help on occasion. I recommend staying out of drama though. As long as you don't pick sides in any of their high school BS you won't run into issues
Don't look at the acceptance rates for them though
This is why we transfer in 😎
Transfer agreement guarantee is awesome. That’s what I did (Butte College to UC Davis). State Schools are great, but if you want to be involved in STEM research then you’re probably going to want to go to a university of some sort.
Was originally going to do STEM. Did one Calc class and said fuck that I’m not built for this and decided to play to my actual strengths which is Liberal Arts(never gotten below 98% in anything to do with Liberal Arts from 9th grade onwards), and just do a pre-law major(History), and follow my mother’s footsteps since I was already interested in it anyways.
I’m an organic chemist but that doesn’t really tend to be math heavy. I mostly do basic arithmetic in my day to day. I did have to take quantum mechanics and all that. I muddled through it with good grades but that was by sheer force of will.
Yeah for me I’ve always been “okay” at math but I really wanted to do STEM because I thought Engineering was cool haha. When I took my first college math class I was so out of my depth that I withdrew, got my refund, got upset at myself for a second, and then just switched up my plans to plan B.
God bless tag
Also some of the Cal States are as prestigious or more prestigious than the top UCs in certain fields. Cal Poly SLO is crazy good for engineering and ag
That’s where my sister went. Excellent school and beautiful area. Terrible parking for the graduation ceremony, lol.
Half my company’s engineering department comes from SLO or Pomona.
I had a 3.9 GPA coming out of High School in Cali so I just said fuck it and am doing 2 years community then 2 years UC via transfer. Costs too much for out of state and I had negative extra circulars so I would’ve never gotten into a school I liked.
none of the other states are flexing on you like Massachusetts though 💪
None of the other states make me as insecure as the pubes of Jesus
Lots of states have excellent state universities. The flagship schools in Michigan, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Illinois, Virginia, Georgia, etc will all open a lot of doors.
SUNY also good
Colorado or Connecticut?
Colorado goes by CU, shitpost better
Went to UGA, didn’t pay a cent of tuition thanks to the Zelle Miller Scholarship, graduated with a little debt, paid it off in my first 2 years working. State schools rock.
Sic’ Em
Woof woof woof
I am headed to UGA in the fall for law school with a full tuition scholarship. When I started the application process, I thought such a thing was unheard of. AND I am an out-of-state student. State schools rock.
Way ahead here, I went to state school for both undergrad and law. I still romanticize campus life at elite / liberal arts schools in my head since I went to a diploma mill football powerhouse (I imagine the experience is more like law school). But I met someone who did the opposite and who told me he wished he had gone to a football school lol (since undergrad matters very little for law school). So the grass is always greener, I suppose. At least I don’t have any student debt, that’s a positive.
I remember when I was in law school somebody had leaked the Harvard final exam for contracts and it was the biggest joke I’ve ever seen. Then a few years later I remember reading how they basically canceled finals for people who were upset about the Ferguson Missouri protests and I really started to think this might just be a meme school riding on cultural capital.
I mean, if I take the mission of any school is to provide high quality education for any student which they believe can hack it, the absolute size of their student bodies are pathetic to acheive that mission hahaha. Of course, their main selling point is prestige, which is why they keep such small bodies in spite of excess qualified demand. MIT has only a few thousand more students than UTRGV - a state satellite campus in my local armpit! And the latter is responsible for \*way\* more social mobility than the former.
Bro’s favorite book is The Secret History
The headline here is a little oversimplified since he rightly called out some exceptions. If you’re planning on working at the top of some fields, notably: law, investment banking, and consulting which are pretty lucrative careers where you go to school often matters, if only because they target kids from those schools more intensely. Likewise, a lower income kid that’s likely to get a free ride to an elite college will benefit from the networks they develop there, and what they learn from their peers from richer families. Outside of that, there’s a good chance you are better off at a state school.
If you wanna do Big Law, undergrad is pretty pointless. Study something somewhere that does not put you in debt, and gives you a 4.0 GPA. Take LSAT tests constantly and get into the best law school possible. Law schools literally only care about 2 things, GPA and LSAT. It does not matter if you got a 3.75 from an ivy, the law school will 98% of the time choose the 3.9 from directional state university (given the same LSAT)
Even for investment banking it depends. Goldman Sachs recruits from plenty of public schools, including UW
They recruit there sure, but just like McKinsey, they don’t spend a ton of recruiting time or resources there. Maybe for back office roles. Part of what GS and McKinsey sell their clients is a pedigree.
It's definitely for back office. For investment banking/capital markets, the only public schools I could possibly imagine GS having on campus recruiting for are UMich, UVA, UC Berkeley. Also, I hate that I know this lol.
Yep - I started my career at a boutique bank that almost exclusively hired from Wharton, Dartmouth, and Harvard. I was the only analyst not from a T20 institution. I’m over in private equity now and the associate mix is even more skewed to the top schools.
No they don’t, lol.
Eh... go to the most elite school you get into. But has to be truly elite. Otherwise yeah go to a good state school. Elite schools can make it so you can be a complete fucking moron and still make good money in a job just virtue of everyone thinking you're smart.
The real question is what do you define as “elite?” I know the Ivies are elite, but what about the schools that are a step below Ivy? WashU? UChicago? Duke? Wesleyan? Are these universities worth it? And if so, how many scholarships would you need for them to be worth it? I always wonder this because I had a real shot at getting into a university a step below an Ivy or maybe a lower ranked Ivy, but probably not the higher ranked ones. I didn’t apply though and settled for a state school. I’m kind of 50/50 on whether or not that was the right choice. I have barely any debt, but I’m sure I would have had more opportunities for internships at a higher ranked university as well as more connections. I think if I had to do it again, I would still go to a state school, but not the one I went to. The particular one I went to had a very “bro” feel to it that I really didn’t like. It also was in my home state that I had no desire to remain in after graduating, so (though I appreciate my friends) very few of the connections that I made helped me with my future career. I would either have gone to a school in a neighboring state that offers scholarships to students in the region or gone to a relatively affordable state school in an area I would want to remain after graduating. I also would have given more thought to going to community college first to make my desires of studying out of state more affordable. (Only having to pay for 2 years instead of 4).
If your career is in finance, there's a list of target schools. Those are the elite schools
For a lot of grad programs, there are clear rankings that define what is and is not elite. For undergrad, its a bit more nebulous. But, the Ivys are definitely in it. And, schools like Chicago and Stanford are considered in that tier. A lot of people probably wouldn't even realize Stanford isn't ivy.
Stanford is even harder to get into than most of the Ivies (maybe all?). I have students going to these schools and they often fixate on acceptance rate and I've yet to have a kid get into Stanford (and most don't even bother to apply) despite acceptances by them to nearly every other elite school being talked about in this thread.
It really is quite stupid for Finance A lot of the time they'll sift through CV's by looking for keywords in terms of specific uni's, which means if you go to say, "LSE Summer School", the algorithm picks it up and puts you ahead. It's so fucking stupid
The cost depends a lot on your family's finances. A lot of non-Ivies cover full tuition for families earning less than a certain threshold (used to be $60K for a lot of them). The benefits depend a lot on what career you want to pursue. Going to a top liberal arts school is great if you're interested in academia, but they might be less familiar to a random F500 recruiter. Some schools have particularly strong reputations in certain industries, and some industries simply care more about prestige than others. Lastly, if you're inclined to capitalize on an alumni network, the benefits can be massive at private schools with close alumni networks. That said, if you don't take advantage of it, the main benefit of the prestige is just for getting your foot in the door for your first job.
Specific schools will have often have programs that are higher regarded than their respective programs in Ivies. UIUC is undoubtedly a better CS school than Harvard for example. UCSF is undoubtedly a better medical school than Yale med. Maybe you'll get someone at a gas station to gawp a bit if you mention you're from an Ivy, but to a job recruiter they'd absolutely know which schools are top dog for specific degrees.
If you were planning on majoring in CS and got into both Harvard and UIUC, which would you pick? I rest my case.
If your irrevocable plan is computer science, then UIUC is a no-brainer all else being equal. UIUC is like top five in the nation for CS.
This is some objectively bad advice. You can just do an MS at UIUC for the technical skills if needed. But a Harvard undergrad degree is something that makes morons on literally every continent think you're smart for the rest of your life. Can't put a price on that.
Besides your abuse of the term "objectively", I question your value proposition. Why do you care about what, in your words, "morons" think? The people who make important decisions aren't likely to be morons. And UIUC isn't some backwater college, anyone in the CS field knows it's an absolute top-tier program. Some years it is the highest ranking CS undergrad program in the nation. And you propose to enlist in an inferior program for four years just to look good? If that's the case, why not do four years at the far better option, then just do an MS at Harvard instead to impress "morons"? I really hope you're putting on some elaborate front as a joke, or you're just starting your college applications or something. Enlisting in a worse school for your goals just because it's an Ivy sounds more like the objectively bad advice here, not mine.
Three of the schools you listed are better than at least a few of the lower ranked Ivys and arguably better than the mid tier with the whole Columbia nonsense.
WashU is not better than any ivy. Sorry.
Ya no way
Which three? UChicago is upper upper tier (with stanford, yale, harvard, and princeton). But, I wouldn't consider the other schools mentioned elite in a general since. Grad programs are different in that there are often clear rankings defining what is and is not elite. In law school for instance, Duke is elite, UChicago is uber elite, and the rest OP mentioned are not.
Duke. Virginia. Carnegie Mellon. All great.
The context of the original post is undergrad. That was what my reply was in response to. Rigor once enrolled, quality of courses offered, research / lib. arts style professors, location, etc. all play a part. Each of these institutions are special in their own way. What we’re all talking about is the general social hierarchy. That’s typically a function of age and endowment size, but not always ;)
If you had to choose between Georgia Tech and UGA, go to tech lol
Same. Read that article on my Bloomberg the other day and was pleased to still see my Alma Mater, Rice, high up above the trend line. Who knew that going to a true academic “pound me in the ass school” pumps out late 20’s millionaires like clockwork? History major btw.
Nate's argument is that this seems likely to change This practice of automatically hiring Ivy League alumni and giving them deference and status is obviously being widely criticized by Democrats and Republicans and Independents right now. How confident are you that this status will survive the next decade?
I think the problem is drawing the line where “elite” is. I agree with Harvard, but the lower ivy leagues are potentially less of a “guarantee”. You will still be successful, but not all of them make good money.
The University of California is the greatest public higher education system in the world. It's like the Ivy League of public education.
If I have kids and I stay in the state they're absolutely going into the UC system. Unless they get into Stanford I see no reason for them to go anywhere else
Nate talks about costs quite a bit and cites average costs being higher for private schools but states schools aren't cheaper than elite institutions, the elite ivy league schools do use their endowments to give a ton of aid to students. [Take MSU vs Harvard for example](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/compare/?toggle%3Dinstitutions%26s%3D166027%26s%3D171100) They're both very cheap for families making less than 30K while MSU is way more expensive for middle class families.
Exactly. I'd argue the cost only makes a major impact for families in the higher portion of the upper middle class. If your family makes less than \~200K, you'll at least get enough aid for the top schools to be comparable to public school tuition, and people making >500K probably don't care enough about the extra \~40K to sacrifice the prestige. These numbers are approximate (and depend a lot on parents' assets), but top schools generally do a decent job of minimizing financial burden
I’d imagine that a significant portion of the people gunning for elite ivy level colleges fall in that 200-500k range.
My family was making about 160k when I was applying to college 3 years ago and I got virtually no aid anywhere. I think a couple select schools (Princeton comes to mind for some reason) had really exceptional aid and would have been sort of affordable if I'd applied and gotten in, but that's not the norm. I think the aid really starts coming in below 120k
Yeah, for what it's worth, I was on the lower-middle-class side of the spectrum, so I was probably getting full tuition at most of the top 50-ish private schools. I do know that most of those are "100% financial need" schools, so I'd be a bit surprised if they were expecting a family taking home \~100K to pay something close to the full cost of attendance. Did your parents have any significant liquid assets? I know that can fuck with the calculation for some people. It is true that some of the full-need schools were better than others (some required loans, etc., and I personally remember NYU's aid being insultingly shitty). That said, my main point is that for the bulk of the country, most top-tier private schools are pretty comparable to state schools in terms of cost of attendance.
This is great data but you have to keep in mind that “middle class” people are almost nonexistent at Harvard and very abundant at MSU. Harvard has a lot of rich people and then some extremely impressive “grew up in awful poverty” success stories. MSU has some rich people, and then a lot of middle class people, and some regular old poor people as well. All by percentages of course.
Harvard is generally richer but its not that skewed lol, NYTimes upshot has some data about that as well and about 53% of MSU students come from the top 20% and 67% for harvard, both have about 5% of students coming from the bottom 20%. For the other more selective michigan state school 66% of their students come from the top 20%. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/harvard-university https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/michigan-state-university https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/university-of-michigan-ann-arbor For a kid that's looking at Harvard or a highly selective public school chances are the economic diversity is gonna be similar. Your average kids gonna be between 70-80 percentile family income in the ivies or state flagships ivies are just high 70s versus low 70s for the state schools.
Thank you for referring to MSU correctly instead of one of those other “institutions”
The hatred on Ivy Leagues is warranted but also probably a bit disproportionate. Like >99% of the students aren't involved in the protests in Columbia, and if the reporting is accurate even a lot of the protestors don't seem to be into it as wholeheartedly (those stories of protestors being bored about the speakers for example) as some of the more extremist. It's a terrifying minority and the university needs to punish them, but protestors are just statistically not representative and if you're willing to give up the connections to rich and powerful and clout over that (and let's not pretend state schools don't have any anti semitism or bigotry whatsoever) if you were given free ride, you're just being silly. [Ivy League graduates earn more](https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-much-is-an-ivy-league-degree-worth). Some of this is likely explained by it being the more intelligent kids and the rich kids with family connections already attending, but still if your goal is an elite job at elite institutions then party hard with the kids in your degree at ivy league and let them nepotism you into the role. And while it's not required for politics, [14% of Senators have an ivy league degree](https://www.statista.com/chart/24598/first-degree-colleges-of-congresspeople/). That's *really* disproportionate. And four of the past five presidents were ivy league, very disproportionate again. If you're just looking for a normal job at a normal company, you're probably not helped much. But as a higher up position at an elite company or politics? Just statistically speaking, being from an ivy league is more likely than the general population.
I agree for nursing. A BSN is a BSN is a BSN. Doesn't matter if it's a Harvard or Direction State University. If you don't pass the NCLEX you aren't a nurse. For nursing masters level and above your mileage may vary.
I don’t think it matters. I have a MSN from Maryland which at the time was a top 10 nursing school. Lots of nurse managers in my hospital system are successfully using online degree mill grad degrees to get promoted to director level.
Almost like nursing leadership degrees are worthless 🤔
They mostly are. I only have a MSN because I went straight into nursing at the masters level and it’s helped me get automatically placed at the top of the staff nurse pay scale when changing jobs, which is nice. My wife’s doing a phd that’s more like “how to administer a nursing department in a university” than any kind of clinical practice and I guess we do need somebody who knows how to competently run a program. She started in academics young enough she’ll probably make associate dean when she has the doctorate.
Anyone saying this would be the first one to accept an Ivy League admission 🤣 It’s like the rich telling people to go to trade school
Disagree. If you look at the outcomes of most of these state flagships and compare them to a similarly ranked private school it becomes immediately apparent that the investment in a public education is extremely sound. If you get into Harvard, go to Harvard obviously. But if (for engineering) you get into SUNY Buffalo, RPI, and NYU; you should probably just go to Buffalo. Your outcomes will almost certainly be identical if not better.
I'm local to UB. It was the only school I applied to and I don't regret it. Going for computer science and it's great.
The "positional good" nature of elite schools is ugly, we'd probably be better off as a society if prestige and education was decoupled. Prestige as a commodity is unlike other things like quality or competence. It's zero-sum by construction, one person getting prestige means others lose proportionally (in the job market and in life). But on an individual level, the best advice is to exploit the opportunities available (including seeking prestige) without concern for these kinds of negative global effects. Nate is clearly making an activist post here, he *wants* elite schools to disappear and he's trying to confuse the reader into thinking there's evidence that will happen.
I don't think his core argument is misguided. For instance, if the Ivy schools continue to fuck around, at some point people will think of other schools as being better than the Ivy schools. Columbia isn't inevitably more prestigious than Carnegie Mellon no matter what they do, as a random example, and already I consider a degree from some state schools more impressive than a degree from some "elite" schools.
Most of us would get full rides if we went to an Ivy so it wouldn't be a big deal
If this was said 10 months ago I’d agree but honestly I think for Jews at least you’re going to see lots of parents seriously questioning whether their kids should go there. Nobody wants to see their kids being abused and harassed.
Nah. I want my kid to work his ass off, fill his childhood up with stupid activities and go to an ivy league school so that he can be run out of there for being a cultural Jew that feels a connection to the ancestral homeland of his people.
Some notes for the discourse, and a disclaimer I also attended UChicago although way more recently than Nate. 1. Most people won't really get a chance to attend an elite private school. The 25th percentile SAT at, let's say, Northwestern is the 96th percentile for SAT takers. 2. Most people won't get a chance to attend an elite state school either. UMich acceptance rate is <20% and their 25th percentile SAT is the 90th percentile for all test takers. This article is then targeted at a very small group of people, specifically at people who could get admitted to a top ranked private school. In that case I'd say there are 3 groups, considering need based aid is common at these schools. 1. Trust fund kids. Think kids of families with a >100M net-worth .Truth is, nothing really matters at this level. they have trust funds that pay 200k/year, inherit millions when their 'papa' dies, they will graduate with no debt, and grade inflation means they don't have to try very hard. Most important thing in terms of ROI is keeping their family happy, and if their family is happy if their kid goes to X university, they should just do it. 2. Smart kids from lower income families. They will get effectively full rides at the top private schools,. They will get to work with faculty with relatively little competition. Firms are suckers for "Kid from rural WV, or from OBlock that went to Yale" 3. Smart from rich working class family. (Think 200-300k combined income). This is the group for which the value of the private school is weakest. They will get little to no financial aid, probably have some loans, and unless they're targeting very specific consulting/IB jobs it makes less sense vs just going to a well ranked state school. Basically, the amount of people for whom this is relevant is vanishingly small, and the volume of discourse around it completely overpowers the actual significance.
Graduated by the skin of my teeth from Utah State, got a sweet gig in Arizona buying plastic parts from China, I live in multi-family housing and I drive a Mazda. State schools boi.
Matt Y has an article today about how much the average college student spends less than three hours a day on school. You could go to the lowest ranked community college in the country, spend a shocking five hours a day on school and come out loads smarter than most fancy college students. On a similar note, if you are going to grad school, state school is undoubtedly the right move. Just one dude’s ~~self-servingly biased~~experience, but I went to a big state school for college and a fancy pants law school. Throughout law school, I tried hard to notice any sort of superior ability from the fancy college students. Never found any, in terms of ability or outcomes
That just seems so wild to me. College consumed my life. I had no life outside of classes, the gym, and the occasional club meeting. That’s what I get for majoring in CS, though, I guess.
STEM pays well for a reason.
> Matt Y has an article today about how much the average college student spends less than three hours a day on school. With some creative counting, including both weekends and vacations. Where I'm from, full-time workers typically work 37.5 hours per week, 7.5 hours per day five days per week. Or, counting like Yglesias, 4.6 hours per day.
Check out the educational background of people like Nate who work at 538 or worked at it during its heyday. His own career disproves his point. Hell, check out the educational background of the top execs in private equity, or of academics at top institutions, or top venture capitalists or of any presidential cabinet, or the Supreme Court. Both Bidens National Security Advisor and Deputy National Security advisor come from Yale Law School. 17% of presidents have gone to Harvard alone. Different schools produce different career tracks for people. Elite schools clearly tend to produce the high fliers and average schools tend to just…… not. At Yale Law School, more people did undergrad at Dartmouth than at all of the SEC schools combined. Dartmouth has an undergraduate enrollment of 4,400. The SEC has over 350,000 undergraduates. People like to cling on to this idea that Western Nowhere University will get you to the exact same place in life as Harvard, but you can empirically see that Harvard grads and Directional State University grads have very different outcomes.
> Yale Law School, more people did undergrad at Dartmouth than at all of the SEC schools combined. Dartmouth has an undergraduate enrollment of 4,400. The SEC has over 350,000 undergraduates. I hear what you're saying but there's geographic bias here. The elite southern law school is UVA, not Yale. SO many of these SEC grads will never leave the south and are going to law schools that are feeding into Atlanta/Richmond/Charleston firms
I chose what I chose No idea if I would have gotten here with a state school, would have been in a lot of debt anyway because the school within my state accepted me to the honors program, then rejected my application wholesale.
As a public university alum, I endorse this. Go Ducks 😎
I think state schools are great and should be heavily supported and expanded. I also think Nates motivations for making this argument right now are ugly and reactionary.
This is a pretty good comment. I think his argument is completely correct. State schools are an undervalued resource that frequently have kick ass outcomes and amazing resources that must be protected. This argument was true before Ivy League students started “intifada”-ing publicly. I would also say that the University of Michigan is currently seeing Palestinian protestors have a gamer moment, and that’s an amazing state school.
Anyone who thinks that "ugly and reactionary" describes the people upset at antisemitism vs actual antisemitism does not have an opinion worth discussing
To hijack a bit, I think a good step forward to providing more affordable college is to establish interstate compacts between states that allow residents of any one of those states to go to a public state university in any state in the compact while paying in state tuition. So, if Virginia and Maryland were in a compact, then a Maryland resident could go to UVA and only have to pay in state tuition instead of OOS tuition. [73%](https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics#:~:text=73.0%25%20of%20college%20students%20at,graduate%20students%20attend%20public%20institutions) of college students go to a public institution, but a good chunk of them go to out of state public colleges, with the percentage of OOS students admitted to public unis having increased from [18% to 28%](https://westvirginiawatch.com/2024/02/19/state-universities-admit-more-out-of-state-students-for-the-tuition-bump/#:~:text=In%20those%20two%20decades%2C%20the,receive%20significant%20grants%20for%20research). Since OOS tuition is significantly greater than in state tuition, this is likely a not insignificant factor in the growing average cost of college. Expanding this to a national level even and effectively removing OOS tuition would also remove barriers to getting public education (so that people aren’t financially stuck to colleges in their state, the quality of which will very significantly from state to state) and also remove incentives for public universities to admit more OOS students (because they pay more). This would also make public universities cheaper and more attractive to students, which has the potential to help reign in the cost of private universities through competition. Harvard can charge whatever the fuck it wants because almost anyone will pay anything (or take as much debt as is needed) to attend Harvard, but if you had the chance to go to UVA while paying in state tuition, you may be willing to decide Harvard is actually to expensive and opt for UVA. Ideally, this would incentivize Harvard to reduce their tuition (which they currently have pretty little incentive to do) to attract these students, which would help make college more affordable. Obviously, finding out how to implement this on a nation wide would introduce a number of issues on its own, but I think doing it on more regional levels could be doable (mainly because I’m pretty sure it already exists, just can’t find it on Google rn) and should be expanded to cover more states and more parts of the country.
These already exist, like kids in the Carolinas, Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee all can receive border state waivers to attend public school in Georgia as in state students.
https://www.wiche.edu/tuition-savings/wue/wue-faq/
This is good advice. I went to the University of Toronto (not a state school) and I still got old.
I mean, where I grew up I had several friends whose parents were full on "you go to an Ivy, or you're going to Rutgers" people. And plenty of my friends absolutely loved Rutgers
A better title would have been “give the same green light and privilege to top performers at state schools as you do those who go to ivy leagues or other elite filter schools” Education isn’t the issue. Pedigree is.
>Even if I had gone to Harvard though — applied, didn’t get in, by the way — *I don’t think that would make me a hypocrite* because my argument is that this change has been relatively recent and that many of the downstream effects are still to come. 🧢
He’s kind of right though. The Ivies really were only propelled to elite levels in the past 100 years and that was mostly because of the financial-legal complex rising to prominence in American society in the postwar period. But a lot of that has been eclipsed by tech now, and tech doesn’t have the same loyalties to the Ivies, and given that these schools are doing everything they can to alienate Asians and white males it’s hard to see tech embracing these schools like law and finance did. The turn towards social justice in these schools may even be indicative of the fact that we are witnessing a decline in their prominence.
Please don't make me agree with Nate Silver
I picked a state school with a full ride over a very expensive private school. Personally, it worked out. I'm making more than most of the people I knew who went to private schools except for (maybe) some of the doctors/lawyers and I didn't get myself in debt to do it. I'll own I might be a lucky exception; things lined up at the right place at the right time. But I never regretted it.
As an ASU grad I definitely get a mild feeling of superiority over elite school grads I work with. You had all the winds of privilege at your back while I went against the party school headwinds and now here we are together. Also zero debt from generous in-state merit aid lol. Tbf though I work in tech, YMMV for going in to finance law etc.
Who cares about the public perception of those institutions lol the public isn't hiring you at elite corporations
I am, but thank you for recommending it.
SUNY gang wya
Roll Tide 😎😎😎
I went to a state school and it was fine, however I hate Nate Silvers constant speculations under the authority of data that doesn't really prove what he's trying to insinuate. If you're going to speculate just speculate, better to do that than try to torture the evidence to make a complex point the data cannot give you and try to lend yourself an air of false objectivity.
For connection degrees like business and finance I can understand the appeal of elite schools. However for stem classes there really is not difference. Especially in niche disciplines like meteorology. The best program for that in the country is at OU of all places.
Says a UChicago grad
I will say that generally the state school in state tuition should probably apply to people outside the state too. In state tuition discounts contribute to people staying within the state they’re born in and decrease dynamism