Are Ivy League schools overrated?

http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/30/23581/

by forrest_t • 12 years ago

32 46 12 years ago

dmix• 12 years ago

YC/pg seems to be obsessed with Ivy league kids. When I went to startup school it was at Stanford and I met quite a few ivy league kids from the east coast. Plus a lot of YC companies I read about seem to be started by them.

jaekwon• 12 years ago

That's not surprising because YC is the Ivy league of incubators.

delinquentme• 12 years ago

looooool so you're mentioning this comment on your application? Edit: Yes we all know YC is a great accelerator, but the ass kissing ?

nemothekid• 12 years ago

Seems like confirmation bias. It might just be Ivy League kids (with their most high school performance and/or wealth access) are more likely to be attend events like startup school or start a company. The same factors that attract people to Ivy Leagues may the same as those that attract them to YC.

ahsanup2• 12 years ago

With improved access to high-quality online education, we may soon be asking "Are all colleges overrated?"

(Though I think the college experience plays an important part in a teenager's maturation process.)

bluedino• 12 years ago

It will take a generation for the mindset to change that a purely online degree or a collection of classes from something like EdX are equal to 'Degree from State U'.

ahsanup2• 12 years ago

For the masses, yes. But for those willing to take their future into their own hands, I think you'll see a shift away from traditional college education.

Really think that apprenticeship should make a comeback in America. I know I would have benefited from spending some time in industry after high school.

rifung• 12 years ago

After taking online classes myself, I am going to have to say that they they still have some ways to go. And like you say, the courses themselves are only part of the value of college. That's not to say that eventually online courses won't be as useful. Perhaps the best thing would be some combination of the two, being able to learn from world class professors while also having a local community to meet with who are doing the same.

seanflyon• 12 years ago

I think co-location is a valuable part of education, and that while online lectures will revolutionize education the best programs will still have central locations were students gather and some amount of in person teaching. Good telepresence is a counter argument, but I don't think it will be enough to simulate living in the same building as other intelligent people with similar interests and the uniting goal of learning.

tsotha• 12 years ago

Overrated based on what criteria? You don't go to an Ivy because you're going to learn more there.

santaclaus2• 12 years ago

You will probably learn more at Stanford or Caltech or MIT -- not that you won't get a great education at Princeton or Harvard, quite the opposite, but the real advantage of an Ivy League degree is the chance to network with the children of presidents and such.

jeffreyrogers5• 12 years ago

Caltech or MIT, sure. I'm not as sure about Stanford though. Everyone I know at Stanford got in largely for legacy or athletics. While I have no doubt they'll be successful (based on their personalities and other intangibles) they're far from brilliant.

Additionally, as I wrote elsewhere on this thread, the networking benefits of an elite education primarily benefit those who had a good network in the first place. If you look at the type of student who lands a top finance or consulting job I'm sure you'll see the truth in this as well.

therobot24• 12 years ago

Having been on both sides of the coin - did my undergrad at a satellite commuter campus of a public institution, and currently doing my PhD at a top 10 school - there is a stark difference. During undergrad I just made the assumption that 'math is math' and I can learn the same concepts anywhere. However, there is a large difference and it's not because top institutions necessarily have the benefit of rubbing shoulders with elite.

- Having TAed for a few undergrad classes, the workload and class speed is much higher.

- The student projects (labs) are much more involved to the point where a 4th year student will often have the tools necessary to assist in PhD research efforts.

- The teachers at the commuter school were much better at stepping through the material so it's easily understood. While here the TAs are much more responsible for expanding and clarifying the theory in recitations.

- Soooo much more group work at the top university. Whether it's 'official' or not, students clump together to help get through the material. At the commuter school, people were more often just waiting to go home.

There's some difference here since I'm not comparing a traditional university experience to a top tier experience, but if anything it's very clear to me that 'math isn't just math' between two schools.

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

Not a new or controversial idea here, I'm 41 and this was the prevailing wisdom back when I was in high school and wasn't a new idea then either.

Going to an Ivy League school is and always has been mostly about having more "elite" networking opportunities and having an early social proof that you can get into an "elite" club.

The value of the actual education received (especially at the undergrad level where access to more exotic lab equipment and such is less of an issue for most majors) is highly variable in terms of the school, the student, and the overlap between the two, just like in any other college setting.

taude• 12 years ago

When I first moved east, I was enamored with MIT and Harvard and the whole east-coast-prep-school-thing. Then I worked with a bunch of grads from these schools and was underwhelmed. I was expecting that they'd be smarter and better at what we were doing. That's when I figure out that you go to Ivy League schools because of the doors they open via the people you meet and network with, not because you're going to learn more in the History 101 class or even your intro to Data Structures class.

santaclaus2• 12 years ago

MIT is not in the Ivy League!

vonklaus• 12 years ago

to be fair, I would imagine that on balance, kids from MIT (especially in STEM degree tracks) are more intelligent than those at a small liberal arts school. Honestly, probably most schools outside the Ivys and known tech schools like Urbana-Champagne, Harvey-Mudd, Caltech, etc.

ianstallings• 12 years ago

I'd kill for some of the connections I've seen elite school graduates get. For instance If you go to Harvard Business and get your MBA the connections you get may very well lead to riches. The fact that you made it into a such an elite institution leads people to believe, rightly so, that you are capable of great things. So it's easier to get backing or get people to talk to you.

I'm not a graduate of any college but the two guys I work directly with have advanced degrees from MIT and Harvard so I can see first hand how that experience has already helped them.

jeffreyrogers5• 12 years ago

I go to one of these elite schools and the primary benefit is in the connections you make. However, the worthwhile connections are generally only available to those who would have been successful regardless. For example, when I look at my friends who've landed the best jobs/internships they overwhelmingly got their interviews due to who they knew at the company already, which mainly came back to either who their parents knew (largely related to how wealthy their parents were) or what social club they were in (again, largely correlated with wealth).

So yes, the connections at elite schools are great, but they primarily serve to reinforce the same social structure that already exists. That said, there are certainly exceptions and it is possible to make these connections if you come from a less privileged background, but the odds are against you since you 1) don't know where to look to make these connections and 2) aren't like the people who you want to make connections with and so you're less likely to connect in the first place.

raverbashing2• 12 years ago

Yes, you can compare, let's say, average income of graduates over a certain period and see that they're bigger for Ivy League graduates

But of course averages lie more often than not, and I suspect that, income curves are double peaked for the Ivy League graduates (meaning that'll have the "mere mortal" avg salary and the "exceptionals" forming another peak)

dfxm12• 12 years ago

But are the type of people who go to Ivy League schools different from everyone else?

I mean: If you're talented enough to get into Harvard, maybe you don't need a Harvard education to succeed in life (for various definitions of "succeed").

I could have gone to an Ivy League school but chose not to. I really can't fathom having a better college & post-college experience than I did...

raverbashing2• 12 years ago

I mean: If you're talented enough to get into Harvard, maybe you don't need a Harvard education to succeed in life (for various definitions of "succeed").

Exactly what I think.

Of course, there's the contacts, but that's overrated (and you can get them in a couple of other ways)

You just need to consider how many Harvard successful alumni are actually Harvard dropouts.

There's an important value in education, but I think the value of formal education (especially in traditional ways) is diminishing.

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

I could have gone to an Ivy League school and didn't, and I consider that to have been a very big mistake. The environment would have done me a lot of good.

Anyway, anecdotes are anecdotes.

geebee3• 12 years ago

It does depend on major, though.

What's interesting about this report is that it breaks it down by college and major.

http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/best-scho...

If you major in CS, your mid-career salary is generally quite high from UCs and other state universities. There's a couple issues here, though. For starters, this is heavily influence by higher salaries in California. Also, there's a survivor bias at state schools. While it is clearly harder to get into Stanford than a UC, my guess is that more students get bounced from the CS major at UCs… so this may also reflect the fact that fewer students succeed in their chosen major at those schools.

temuze• 12 years ago

If you're committed to going to a college and you get admitted an Ivy, you should absolutely go. Nowadays most of their financial aid plans are fantastic, the professors are amazing, you're surrounded by brilliant people and the reputation is a great perk when finding a job.

Princeton, for example, has financial aid for 60% of its students and the average grant covers 96% of tuition for undergraduates. 75% of students graduate debt free. It's hard to compare other deals to that. Source: http://www.princeton.edu/admission/financialaid/

And of course, many top tier non-Ivy schools are similarly awesome by these criterias and should be grouped together with them in this discussion.

That said, the concept of "going to a good school" is absolutely overrated by employers, as is the concept of needing to go to through a four year liberal arts education. I know many hackers with a high school education who could run rings around some of my ex-classmates when doing honest-to-god software engineering.

However, what college education lacks in practicality, it makes up for it in the experience. Having four years to learn what you want and having fun with brilliant young people? Sounds awesome, sign me up again.

dobbsbob• 12 years ago

Princeton has Brian Kernighan as an academic advisor http://www.cs.princeton.edu/ugrad/becoming-cs-major and their undergrad CS theory courses look incredible compared to the univ I went to, and I paid only $10k/yr less in tuition than a Princeton student.

geebee3• 12 years ago

Many low income students don't apply to the ivies because they believe they can't afford them. It often turns out that they would have gotten such good financial support that they end up paying more for a local state school.

unknownian• 12 years ago

I started my first year of college this semester at an Ivy. There are flaws, but overall the experience is pretty great, or at least, being around famous professors/thinkers is. I wish it could be extended to more people though. "Egalitarian" opportunities in education seem to go against the idea that some students will work harder and perform better than others though.

eroo• 12 years ago

Steven Pinker offers a very convincing dissection of the referenced Deresiewicz article [1].

[1] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league...

TL;DR:

- Deresiewicz is willfully ignorant/misleading in his pursuit of being controversial.

- Ivy league students are smart, but there are smart students everywhere.

- Admissions to Ivy league schools is not as objective as it should be. There is too much focus on fluff and not ability/potential (e.g., meaningless "volunteer work").

- College isn't for everyone, but if you're going to go, an Ivy tends to be the best place because they have the most resources (and therefore are often counter-intuitively the least expensive).

ihnorton• 12 years ago

That is a great read. It has been posted several times but didn't get much traction, unfortunately.

Admissions to Ivy league schools is not as objective as it should be. There is too much focus on fluff and not ability/potential (e.g., meaningless "volunteer work").

To expand on this a little bit: he describes the current admissions systems as "eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism that jerks teenagers and their moms around and conceals unknown mischief" and he laments that "test-based selection used to be the enlightened policy among liberals and progressives, since it can level a hereditary caste system by favoring the Jenny Cavilleris (poor and smart) over the Oliver Barretts (rich and stupid)."

(aside: I don't understand why the parent story was modded into oblivion over the course of 10 minutes)

Zigurd• 12 years ago

Pinker goes overboard in the opposite direction. He is against "wholistic" admissions because he despises, for entirely good reasons, the current outcomes. He should focus on legacy admissions and sports.

Universities with first tier art, theater, and music departments can't rely on SAT scores for admissions to those departments.

I heartily endorse requiring community service work. While some people will be impervious of learning anything, a few days working in a food bank will expose you to people who smell like cigarette smoke and spend money they badly need to put by on lottery tickets. If you don't get to see they are actual human people and not abstractions, you might see only abstract solutions.

michaelochurch2• 12 years ago

By parents and students? Absolutely not.

By the world? Yeah, obviously. The average IQ at a good state school is about 120. In the Ivies, it's about 125. The standard deviation at each is about 13 points, so the 95th-percentile state school student would be 89th-percentile at an Ivy. That's not a huge difference. It's a lot smaller than the difference in job opportunities.

Here's the biggest (and underdocumented) advantage of having an elite pedigree: when you're presumed smart, you can put 100% of your energies into social polish. You don't have to (a) prove your intelligence, and (b) make the investor/patron feel important and just-slightly superior. You can focus on (b) alone, because (a) was taken care of. That's a huge advantage, because you're not serving two masters.

Within a couple hundred words of conversation, I can prove, to anyone intelligent, that I'm smarter than 90 to 99+% of the pedigreed (depending on how we define "pedigreed") people out raising seed rounds, but it's hard to do that without being a show-off and seeming like an arrogant prick.

It's like the decorative swords that noblemen used to wear. It was valuable to wear one, but unsheathing it and proving you knew how to use it was not always considered acceptable behavior.

jeffreyrogers5• 12 years ago

Where are you getting that IQ data from? I go to one of the Ivies and have never had an IQ test nor have most of my peers I would imagine.

(That said I agree with your premise, my peers at school aren't significantly more intelligent than my high school classmates who went to good, but not great, private and state colleges).

michaelochurch2• 12 years ago

I had an unhealthy obsession with IQ testing. A phase long ago. I remember reading that the average Harvard IQ tested at 130 and the other Ivies in the mid-120s. You can guess based on SAT figures, noting that extracurricular factors (paradoxically) decrease the IQ/SAT correlation (people who beat a top school's extracurricular game are more likely than average to have prepped for SATs and have scores that overstate their IQs). So a 1500 average SAT (out of 1600) ends up mapping to a group average IQ around 130, even though a typical individual with a 1500 SAT is probably around 140 IQ.

These numbers fluctuate and it's quite possible that the increasing usage of socioeconomic/extracurricular criteria has decreased the gap.

DMac87• 12 years ago

Taking a step back, doesn't it seem strange that there aren't more concrete answers to these questions - the debate devolves pretty quickly into anecdotes / commentators' perspectives, as opposed to hard data. Sample sizes should be big enough to at least answer the economic questions (the experience of those four years is of course subjective)!

aardvarks2• 12 years ago

I'm an academic - have worked at a variety of institutions but never officially been at an ivy league school, so I can't strictly speaking claim ground truth. But my impressions are, sure, if your idea of the "education" part of college is to (sometimes) go to classes required for your degree and do exactly what the instructor tells you and that's it, probably it doesn't make a huge difference in terms of academics where you went to school. Everybody uses (almost) the same textbooks, after all. And academic jobs are scarce enough that two instructors of the same subject at very different institutions may actually have had similar undergraduate educations and approaches to undergraduate teaching.

What ivy league and other private research universities excel at academically is scholarly opportunities outside class assignments. If you want to reconstruct 17th century pipe organs or build robotic insects or experiment on extremophiles in Greenland or whatever, there might very well be someone who wants a student to help with something like that. Plus they probably have money to cover your expenses and pay you a stipend for it, and you don't have to compete with 500 other people for the chance. More generally, if there is a particular academic topic you as a student want to learn all about, a top university has a better chance than most places of having someone or something that can help you. But the student has to show up with the initiative and persistence to get that.

The hard part is admissions: what's the best way to find students who will of their own volition seek this kind of thing out? The simple answer would seem to be to look for kids who have a history of doing that and succeeding. But instead that produced this arms race of people seeking lots of extra academic experiences purely for the sake of getting into college and then burning out and not wanting to continue once they got there.

mathattack3• 12 years ago

What ivy league and other private research universities excel at academically is scholarly opportunities outside class assignments.

This is actually true at any school. At large state schools, there are professors doing real research. The difference with the ivy leagues is very few students actually seek these experiences out. (I was one of four undergrads applying for a paid research position during my Big School CS undergrad. I got it as a sophomore because the competition was weak.) I still would have had a better experience at Stanford or MIT, but I think it's more a peer effect.

But instead that produced this arms race of people seeking lots of extra academic experiences purely for the sake of getting into college and then burning out and not wanting to continue once they got there.

This is very true. I was very surprised how many of my friends dropped their extracurriculars in college. The only friends who stayed in music were the ones (like me) who went to large state schools - in essence because we were doing it for it's own sake. Turning college admissions into an extracurricular quest (in addition to a "Don't dare get a B" risk aversion) seems very wrong.

My sense is that this gets sorted out in the end. After a few years of work, all the nonsense about school admissions is gone.

aardvarks2• 12 years ago

What ivy league and other private research universities excel at academically is scholarly opportunities outside class assignments.

This is actually true at any school. At large state schools, there are professors doing real research. The difference with the ivy leagues is very few students actually seek these experiences out.

I completely agree (having been at a large state school) that there are many professors doing high quality research at state schools. I think the difference is (as you suggest) the funding and competition. Funding and even for-credit programs for undergraduate research were (I found) much more limited at state schools. You'd have 10 students, all with straight A's, applying for a single one-semester research assistantship that'd grant 1 course credit. At the same time I know of ivy school subject-specific fellowships of thousands of dollars for summer travel/study for which perhaps only 2 or 3 people would apply simply because there were so many other opportunities available. The net result is that if you're at an ivy, that kind of experience is much much easier to get.

mathattack3• 12 years ago

This fits in with something I’ve noticed. I know this sounds harsh, but when I run across someone who is at the top of their profession and yet seems woefully underwhelming, they often have Ivy League BAs in non-demanding majors (For example, Jeff Zucker, Harvard, History. John Tierney, Yale, American Studies). My working hypothesis is that, while everyone who graduates from an elite school has an advantage in terms of reputation and networks, the actual difficulty of completing certain degrees isn’t that high relative to non-elite schools. Thus a history degree from Harvard isn’t worth that much more than a history degree from a Cal State school.

This has been my experience. I used to hold Harvard, Yale and Princeton in very high esteem. Then I met a dumb as rocks Princeton history major. In his defense, he was in a Sales job, and admitted that Lacrosse helped him get in.

It isn't like history majors in large public schools have any higher of a mean competence.

I reached the opposite conclusion as the article, though. If you're going to major in something soft and what to go anywhere, you have to go somewhere good. You can have a good career with a CS degree from either Yale or Ohio State. If you want to have a good career with a Journalism or History degree, you really need to go to Yale.

hga• 12 years ago

"and admitted that Lacrosse helped him get in"

Indeed. Once you factor in the athletes and worse, legacy admits, Ivies have real trouble building an all around good class by the metrics most in this discussion are using (by their metrics, they're education the future leaders of the US and world, so...).

MIT and no doubt CalTech have a great advantage in that the first calculation in admissions is "can they do the work?"; that, which is a rather high bar, plus tremendous self-selection in applicants, results in a somewhat different student body. Or at least compared to nearby Harvard by my observations.

mathattack3• 12 years ago

CalTech is the tops in my book on this. I don't have a huge sample size, but they are all rock stars. I've met a few less than impressive MITers.

What surprises me is that the Ivies can still have such high average test scores and GPAs despite all the legacies and athletes.

What surprised me about Princeton was that it was Lacrosse. Lacrosse. It convinced me that I want to send my kids to fencing lessons after their math circles.

programminggeek• 12 years ago

The network you can make and the doors it opens are tremendous and without them you have to hustle in a completely different area than you otherwise would.

It's not that they give you a free win, but rather an advantage you can play later as needed. Getting a degree from a no name liberal arts school or a smaller state school is not going to mean the same thing for certain pursuits.

That said, an overachiever can do amazing things with limited opportunity. Advantage or disadvantage, it depends on how you use it.

geebee3• 12 years ago

As someone who attended UC campuses for both undergrad and grad, I do have a strong innate sympathy for large public research institutions. I think that the methodology used by the very influential US News rankings rewards keeping the undergraduate student body small, with relatively few low income students, and penalizes universities for doing the opposite. Almost everything about staying small with lots of money (and fewer low income students) bumps up your numbers. Lower admissions rate, higher SAT scores, better graduation rates. It's all a positive, and there's no penalty for being small and affluent, so why not?

So taking a step back and looking at it as a student, it's an easy call - especially when these elite schools are offering lots of financial aid. If you're high income, tuition doesn't matter. If you're low income, you'll get great financial aid, often better than you would have gotten at a state school.

You'll also get more support. You're much less likely to get kicked out of an "impacted" major (these things don't really exist at elite schools, but people sure do get kicked out of their preferred major at state schools). You're more likely to graduate. Professors and staff aren't trying to accommodate a student body 5 times (or more) the size of a private, so the access is better, less harried. As a grad student at Cal, I heard a bit about Stanford "coddling", and I don't buy it. Supporting a promising student in her quest to major in engineering rather than kicking her out because she got a B- in physics and calculus her first semester in college isn't coddling, it's doing right by your students and is perfectly compatible with high standards. The opposite is, in my opinion, an outrageous waste of talent. Hey, I said I'm sympathetic to UCs but I don't like everything about them.

The only real downside I can see here is that you might not quite understand what's happening out there to higher education. At UCSD, I met a young woman who had to give up on college because her father was claiming her as a dependent, it was messing up her financial aid, and she just needed to work a while. I knew a guy who was trying to major in computer science while paying the rent with a part time job at Nordstrom. And that's at UCSD, a relatively well off and "elite" public! I wouldn't want our future leaders to be too insulated from this kind of thing. I actually do think the best leaders for the future probably should be coming from top public research universities rather than elite privates.

The washington monthly college rankings (and explanation of methodology) were really eye-opening. They asked "what have you done for us lately" - the idea being that if universities are going to receive massive amounts of federal research support (privates get a ton of government support) and enjoy a tax-exempt status, we should be asking what they do for everyone, rather than only those who are able to attend them. I'd recommend reading it for yourself, but generally speaking, they looked at public service (including military service), research output especially in science and engineering, and contribution to social mobility (percentage of low income students). They didn't consider sheer scale, though I think they should - if you can do this for 25,000 undergrads rather than just 5,000 on the same budget, shouldn't that also be considered a positive quality?

By this standard, ivies (according to wash monthly) do appear to be overrated (though interestingly, Stanford still scores very high). They generally don't produce the same quantity and quality of research in science and engineering that you see out of elite publics, they don't enroll very many students, and they especially don't enroll very may low income students (though those they do enroll are treated very generously).

UCs and other elite state schools, on the other hand, rise dramatically to the top.

So are "ivies" overrated? Well, depends on whether you get to attend one. If you're outside the wall, asking what universities are contributing the most to the general welfare, UCLA is probably a lot more valuable than an ivy. But if you get in? Well, you might want to seriously consider going to that ivy.

AmyWasHere• 12 years ago

To be completely honest, I think that people diligent enough can get the same level of education at almost any college. The other thing is connections you may establish and job offers you may get. But other than that you can depend only on yourself. For example at http://britishessaywriter.co.uk/ I've read that about 70% of knowledge you get through self-learning. Teachers and educators are there to merely guide you (yet of course it’s better if they know their thing). All in all, I’d recommend trying all the options and choosing the one with the optimal conditions.

Are Ivy League schools overrated?

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