The value of Higher Ed
 

Check this out. Yeah, I posted it because it confirms what I already believe. But what do y'all think?

Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | New Republic

Interesting article from a guy that grad Columbia and taught English at Yale. ;)

My ROI on a public school system and state university education has been tremendous. To date, no job interview required SAT scores, GPA or "class rank."

I was wondering who Ed was and why he was getting Higher.

I think he's spot on. And I'm sure the fact that I couldn't afford to send any of my litter to Ivy League has nothing to do with my opinion.:rolleyes:

The book Colleges That Change Lives by Loren Pope is an eye opener for anyone whose kids are approaching college age.

It is always much easier to talk about being egalitarian when your belly is full, you are sleeping in a warm and comfortable house in the middle of winter and you have good income. Am I a smarter person if I am a Harvard or Yale grad than a barely accredited school? IDK. The question is, if you are an Ivy League grad and I'm a grad of some backwater school that is accredited but nobody heard of, all things about equal, who will make the best impression when they are looking at candidates. After the good life is had, you can talk all day long about the philosophy but try not to tell that to a hungry and cold person who is living from paycheck to paycheck. He probably won't care.

Is college even the right avenue? IDK. Depends on what you are trying to do. If money is no object, WGAS. If you are like most and have a budget, consideration of whether a college education will have an ROI or not is kinda important. If I am fabulously wealthy, I could do a PhD in flying saucers hidden at Area 51, spend $300K and probably couldn't get a job that I would ever be able to justify the degree with financially. Back on earth, we need to see if we can make a college degree a financial investment or not.

Thanks for posting B, being the parent of an aspiring Ivy leaguer I understand what the author is saying but the quote below does apply to my daughter. Of course she could easily go through the state university system and she can have a free ride at MSU and UofM, she is driven to go Ivy League she accepts nothing less than A's and runs a rigorous diversified after school schedule. Saying that the ROI for Ivy League education is hard for me to stomach because statistically Ivy League, MIT and Service Academy graduates blow standard university graduates away on almost every metric. I may be just an average educated former ground pounder but if my child is so driven that she wants to go Ivy League I'm not going to tell her otherwise.

So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error. Once, a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time. I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.

Got a link to those statistics? My experience with Ivy League grads is mostly that apart from their sense of entitled elitism, they're not significantly different than grads of other schools.

Question is how the average employer feels about Ivy League grads. All things equal, will my No Name School degree be looked on as the same as your Ivy League degree? I want every edge I can get as long as the ROI is there. If it makes it easier for me to get a job, it might be worth it.

These degrees have the worst employment statistics this year

20. Psychology.

19. Religious studies and theology

18. Music

17. Sport & Business Management

16. English Lit

15. Advertisement

14. Business Management

13. English Language

12. Sociology

11. Events Management

10. Accountancy

9. Film Studies

8.Ancient History

7. Media Studies

6. Primary Education

5. French

4. History

3. Criminology

2. Sport Science

1. Geography (With an Employment after 6 months as low as 36%)

2014

I think the article gets a lot of things right except for the class warfare; that's on more than just the Ivys.

And there is a hella ton of financial aid for needs based cases at various Ivys. Here's an example: Yale "Factsheet" | Office of Institutional Research. They'll give 65k a year if you qualify. A big portion of that will probably just be for tuition though, at their valuation. ;)

Students are definitely trained to be timid, but that also results from any upbringing that prioritizes earning capacity above fulfillment. Lots of them are not the scared little animals the article makes out, those are the worst off. I think for lots of them the rat race starts at college and so does their rejection of it. They do see it for what it is but they just don't see any other way forward through life. They have no alternative role models because our society on the whole privileges earning capacity over fulfillment.

It is easy to discuss fulfillment on a full belly, in a warm house sleeping on a comfortable bed and not needing to worry whether you are going to have a next meal or not. You get me the earning capacity and I think I can find my own fulfilment later on.

Go to the ghetto and talk to some guy in a cardboard box on a cold winter night about your existential values and see how much attention you get. Watch that guy scamper towards me when I drop a burger on the floor.

It would be a waste of an education if getting a job was the only goal.

Lots of people with degrees on that list get jobs that are tangential to that degree rather than squarely in it. For example there are very few jobs in media studies but many more doing work in studios, advertising, etc where that background is useful.


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It would be a great waste of someone else's money if you could not make financial sense of the degree. If you are independently wealthy and you wanted to do a PhD in basket weaving, no worries.

That is exactly in line with my experience.