Why is it so much fun to hate Ivy Leaguers? In part, because they (well, we*) can often be so hateable. For years, I toyed with the idea of offering a prize to the first Harvard grad I met who did not, in the first ten minutes of conversation, manage to work that fact into the conversation somehow. ("I see you're eating a bagel there. You know, when I was in school in Boston, I liked to eat bagels . . . ").
I guess I did offer a prize, of sorts; we dated for years.
And don't get me started on the people from Harvard Business School, who, unbeknownst to themselves, were the source of untold hilarity at each and every summer internship program, as they strove to reassure us that they thought that our MBA program was every bit as good as Harvard, honestly.
But really, who cares? As far as I can tell, an Ivy league degree is at best a modest boost. One of my roommates from Penn was, when last heard of, still working at the library and mooching off other peoples' weed. On the other hand, few of the smartest and most talented people I know have Ivy League degrees; it seems to be a better indicator of where you started out than where you'll end up.
The weirdest thing to me about Washington is that this snobbery--and the inevitable reverse snobbery--are more prevalent than in any other city I've lived in. Friends who went to state schools tell astonishing stories of pervasive, yet casual, slights on their school and the people who went there. You would think that a city dominated by politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists would have more of the common touch, but apparently just the reverse.
*There is no way to write this without being accused of parading my Ivy League degree. I'm going ahead anyway.
"You would think that a city dominated by politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists would have more of the common touch, but apparently just the reverse."
Sometimes people from humble backgrounds who work on a big stage are the biggest snobs of all. Maybe they feel inadequate? Also, I think DC tends to be a bit more cutthroat than other cities.
I could look past the reference to your Ivy-ness in the first paragraph. It was the reference to yourself as "a prize" that really made me laugh.
8-)
In the time I spent in Chicago, no one cared about ivy league status. I'd imagine that's also true for most locations west of the Appalachian.
The ivy league schools do seem to loom large on the east coast. but in chicago or L.A., a degree of university of illinois or UCLA doesn't appear deficient in comparison to a degree from Dartmouth or Brown.
I guess I'd kind of taken this as an East Coast thing; coming from the midwest, the DC area is pretty different. But it also occurs to me that Washington has a lot of jobs where you're judged more on appearances and signaling than on your actual productivity, which is often quite hard to measure. So being able to say "I have a law degree from Yale" might be more important in that environment. By contrast, I don't know that anyone in a startup software company is all that interested in your academic background, but they care a lot about whether you can write decent code.
One theory: as the mere fact of having a college education means less and less - now that everybody goes - having an Ivy League education is a way of holding onto some prestige.
People who factor Ivy league degrees heavily when weighing job applicants are essentially taking advantage of the college admissions screening done by these schools (and a little more), since most (or at least many) people who go to most of the Ivies will have a high GPA due to inflation.
In government jobs in DC, there isn't a huge incentive to ensure that someone is highly competent, simply because it'll never be a hundred percent clear if that's true and it's not like you're worried about profits. So going off of an obvious signal like school attended is the way to go for your lazy hirer.
Moreover, once you get enough people with Ivy league degrees, they are extremely likely to systematically overvalue applicants who
have Ivy league degrees, thus perpetuating the cycle.
Even in a competitive market, there may well be enough ambiguity in job performance to make this technique common.
This country is full of outstanding higher ed institutions, and I think it's the competition that makes them so good. Imagine if average NYC high school stalked Bronx Science or Stuyvesant as ruthlessly as some universities wrapped themselves in the mantle of "New Ivies" or "Little Ivies" or "Public Ivies," et c. School choice was the savior of my high school years. Go vouchers.
I went to a Dartmouth because they offered me a MUCH more generous financial aid package than my state university and several other private schools, including two that offered me full tuition (but not living expenses). Dartmouth is institutionally dysfunctional in many, many ways, but social mobility in admissions/financial aid isn't one of them. Then again, Dartmouth is a NESCAC school in every way but football, so it may not be the best example.
Yes, an Ivy league degree gives such a "modest boost" that all six of the Atlantic's bloggers have one, five from Harvard. Surely a mere coincidence. Megan, who reminds us that she went to Penn, is the diversity. And it's not as though this is unique to the Atlantic. The New Republic has been staffed the same way, to a great extent. The obsession of the New York Times with the Larry Summers business and Harvard generally (was Cornel West's move to Princeton really worthy of the front page?) suggests that their staffing practices are similar.
Given all this, to say that only a "modest boost" is provided requires one to believe that substantially all of the clever young people are scooped up by the Ivies and then they merely happen to succeed, not because of any networking advantages, but because of their innate abilities. Of course Megan claims to disagree with that, saying that an Ivy degree really is about "where you start out."
One more fun fact: the last time neither party's ticket in a national election had a Yalie on it was 1968. In 2004 3 of the 4 major party candidates had been at Yale, although Cheney dropped out.
The thing to do is to go to Cornell. That way, you can claim to be an Ivy Leaguer when it's convenient, but you've also gone to a cow college in a small town, so you don't lose the common touch.
AG
(JD Cornell. Bachelor's from a really obscure place.)
speaking of Cornell, my favorite "The Office" character went there, Andy Bernard.
Certain fields, like government, law, journalism, some sciences, prestige really matters.
But in the business field, outside of penn and harvard, no one really cares about your degree (I think that's part of the reason why The office's Andy Bernard is mocked). Doesn't wisconsin have the most CEO's in the country.
Well, those of us who went to school in (ahem) New Jersey don't see what's such a big deal about going to school "in Boston." (At least those guys can say "in Boston"; there's no way for us not to name-drop.)
You must explain to this ignorant foreigner. Do people dislike the Ivy League because they DO give a superior education, or because they DON'T?
In 30 years of working in Washington, I honestly have not really seen any sort of Ivy snobbery. I'm pretty sure I would have noticed because I went to Rutgers, where every single student would have preferred to have been at the lowest ranking Ivy school (Cornell?). Perhaps it is because I had a number of friends from Stanford and Chicago who looked down their noses at Ivy grads.
"As far as I can tell, an Ivy league degree is at best a modest boost..."
In government and media it seems to be a pretty big boost. Vito Marzullo points out the obvious example of The Atlantic, but the Harvard network in particular is strong in Hollywood, particularly in TV-writing
"I'm pretty sure I would have noticed because I went to Rutgers, where every single student would have preferred to have been at the lowest ranking Ivy school (Cornell?)."
Assuming they wouldn't have to pay the difference in tuitions. Did you catch the game against W. Virginia today? Painful to watch. If only Rutgers's first drive of the second half didn't stall with that holding penalty, they might have made a ballgame out of it.
There have been studies of graduates pay that showed that, while being good enough to be accepted at an Ivy League college gives a very big boost in pay, a few years after graduation the people who turned down an Ivy League college and went to somewhere with a less stratospheric atmosphere are doing just as well as the Ivy Leaguers. That is, the businesses that hand out the really big paychecks pay for brains, not for the college those brains went to.
OTOH, in DC the payoff comes in power rather than in (honestly obtained) cash, and I'm not at all surprised that Ivy Leaguers are highly valued in that artificial environment. (Of course, that rather dull Harvard and Yale legacies like Gore and Bush were contenders for the top job of all is quite a big hint that purchased credentials outrate real ability in that city.)
I agree with Fred that the particular field/industry determines the degree of the advantage.
For years, I toyed with the idea of offering a prize to the first Harvard grad I met who did not, in the first ten minutes of conversation, manage to work that fact into the conversation somehow.
It's amazing. I am consistently amazed by this. You would think that they would have heard someone complain about this fact, or would have realized how the do it by now, and feel embarrassed.... And yet, no.
Seems more impressive to refer to Boston meaning MIT than Boston meaning Harvard?
And, no, I did not go to either Harvard or MIT for college but rather George Washington University.
As for places where Ivy League credentials are lauded, well, Manhattan law firms and investment banks would seem to be more besotted with such than DC, if only because said lawyers and bankers earn more than, and therefore are more important than, any bureaucrat or politician or lobbyist.
And, no, I'm neither a corporate lawyer or investment banker either.
"As for places where Ivy League credentials are lauded, well, Manhattan law firms and investment banks would seem to be more besotted with such than DC..."
I don't know much about the law firms, but at investment banks, you'll find a lot of folks with MBAs from Megan's alma mater, Chicago's GSB. No shortage of NYU MBAs either, since they have the best part-time MBA in New York.
Yeah, in general, I'd say in business it matters more how can you do your job than which school you went to, at least once you have your first job. In other words, how are you as an analyst and as a supervisor/manager. I've worked with or for, or had working for me, lots of really competent people who graduated from Michigan State, Western Michigan, Colorado State, and Indiana U, just to name a few off the top of my head. The Harvard MBA's I've encountered in my company have proven to be intelligent (no surprise), but unable (or unwilling) to go beyond the books to discover the reality of our industry.
They do, however, make great consultants, which mostly requires the ability to transcribe the knowledge of lower-level workers and transmit it to upper management untouched by contact with middle management and the willingness to pull a couple of all-nighters over a weekend to have a pitch ready for a Monday meeting (a lot harder to do in the pre-Power Point days than now, but I still love having them do that) on the off chance they'll make partner.
At one time in my school days as a Rutgers student I had a chip on my shoulder against Princetonians (made worse by the fact that through the 60's and into the 70's Princeton mostly beat RU at football), but I think I've mellowed out about that. Anyway, after moving west of the Appalachians I found out folks here were impressed by the name Rutgers (seems since it doesn't have the words New Jersey in the name they don't know it's the state university, and even worse the Moo U of NJ).
The thing to do is to go to Cornell. That way, you can claim to be an Ivy Leaguer when it's convenient, but you've also gone to a cow college in a small town, so you don't lose the common touch.
Dunno if it's still the case, but not long ago New York residents could attend Cornell for state-university tuition rates so long as they majored in agriculture. The SUNY system does/did not have a 4-year agricultural school, so the state contracted with Cornell to provide one.
The next time someone drops the "H" bomb on you, gently remind them that Chicago and MIT graduates can at least add and subtract, Northwestern graduates can at least market and play nice in teams, Stanford and Berkeley graduates started companies, and all Harvard graduates can do is bullshit about case studies while they bankrupt Wall Street and the country.
There is a certain advantage to having an Ivy degree in terms of starting salaries, connections, and the quality of the teaching staff. This advantange is probably more than modest, assuming the right degree from the right school is matched with the right industry and right city.
I started at the rather mundane City University of NY myself, at Baruch College, but ultimately graduated after many a diversion from Rutgers.
What's with all the Rutgers people in this string? Are we perpetually condemned to have Princeton envy? Actually, I had a roommate freshman year who had been accepted at Princeton, but his father told him if he went to Rutgers he would buy him a car. Good deal for the father. In those days tuition at Rutgers was about $100 per semester.
I recall a Prof, who once told my class: "The only people who ask what college I went to are Harvard grads, so I always just tell them I went to Harvard."
Personally when I think of Harvard, I think of the Harvard Enron boys and Henry Kissinger. And the NYSE chairman that ended up in the slammer.
And you can't forget they allowed Ivan Boesky to buy his way into the New York Harvard Club, without ever attending Harvard.
I'll also never forget the chap I met once , who did not strike me as a the brightest bulb in a very dark bar. He told me he was going to Harvard that summer. It was one of those "pay to attend Harvard for a couple weeks so that you can say you attended Harvard" programs that they regulalrly have. His comment to me, "Yeah, they really wanted me, so I figured I could take the two weeks off from work."--This walking idiot has full alumni status.
I don't know much about the law firms, but at investment banks, you'll find a lot of folks with MBAs from Megan's alma mater, Chicago's GSB. No shortage of NYU MBAs either, since they have the best part-time MBA in New York.
UChicago and NYU also boast better undergrad programs than Harvard or Yale (but inferior to Princeton, probably, as much as I hate Princeton.)
When people do this about their high school or country club it's pathetic. It's pathetic about college too (ivy league or otherwise).
Perhaps it is because I had a number of friends from Stanford and Chicago who looked down their noses at Ivy grads.
Of course. How could we not, really? We're taught to think, they're incented to schmooze. (Princeton, of course, is exempted from this characterization.) I've seen similar ivy-disdain from graduates of MIT, Caltech, Rice, Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon, all places that value intellectual acheivement for it's own sake.
Personally when I think of Harvard, I think of the Harvard Enron boys and Henry Kissinger. And the NYSE chairman that ended up in the slammer.
Of Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow, only Skilling had any Harvard connection (he got his MBA there). And I'm not aware of any NYSE chairman who "ended up in the slammer." (Richard Grasso, whose compensation as NYSE chair was challenged in a lawsuit, has never been charged with any crime, and in any event he has no Harvard connection.)
Richard Whitney was NYSE president, convicted of stock fraud in 1937
The ivy league schools do seem to loom large on the east coast. but in chicago or L.A., a degree of university of illinois or UCLA doesn't appear deficient in comparison to a degree from Dartmouth or Brown.
Yes, except for HYP, I think a fairly high percentage of people here in the midwest really aren't all that aware of which other eastern schools are Ivy and which aren't. If you asked them about Cornell and Rutgers, for example, I expect most couldn't tell you which was in which state or which was the private school and which was public.
As for graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton -- around here I would say the knee-jerk reaction from prospective employers would be, uh oh, 'prima donna'. And while it's clear that in NY publishing or banking an Ivy degree is almost a pre-req, in my field (Computer Science) a graduate of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Purdue would have a boost over an HYP graduate, for the simple reason that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton don't have particularly strong engineering programs:
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/eng/brief/engrank_brief.php
For a good laugh at Princeton, the following dialogue (probably written by a Harvard grad) from The Simpsons is priceless:
SIDESHOW BOB: "Oh come, now. You wanted to be Krusty's sidekick since you were five! What about the buffoon lessons? The four years at clown college?"
BOB'S BROTHER CECIL: "I'll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way."
all places that value intellectual acheivement for it's own sake.
Priceless!
MIT isn't Ivy, but for engineering, the Ivy schools are kinda pointless. I guess it is the geek equivalent of Ivy.
Dumbest engineer I have ever met graduated from MIT with great grades. He wanted a multimeter to figure out why a flashlight wasn't working....no, he had not changed the batteries or the bulb, both of which were close at hand.
The smartest engineers I've ever met went to Penn State or similar schools. Great combination of common sense and book smarts.
I know Ivy leaguers make more right out of school just looking at the straight numbers.
(a) but is that really true after you correct for other factors? Sure, the field is deeper at an Ivy (or MIT/Caltech for engineering), but the top couple guys/gals at State U. would've done just fine at the high-end schools. Do the top grads at State U take a salary penalty relative to the middle of the pack at Ivy/etc.?
(b) Has anyone done a basic time-value calculation? Assuming Joe/Jane Graduate would've made $XXXX more a year out of school after taxes if s/he had graduated from
Megan, I think you may be suffering from selection bias here. If someone doesn't tell you where they went to college, you won't know. Given that you live and work in an Ivy heavy environment, you just meet more graduates of those colleges.
Also, I'm used to doing snobbery by major more than by institution. More respect for a physics major at George Washington than a Lit major at Columbia. (Of course, the Lit majors seem to see the rankings in the opposite direction, but that's just silly)
Most college-snobbery is merely class snobbery. A lit degree from Brown is as useless as a lit degree from community college, in terms of marketable skills. It's not like you're learning a useful skill like you might at UTI or something like that.
What you are getting can be even more valuable - it is the chance to schmooze with rich white people. The diploma says "you are accepted into rich white society".
It might not get you a better paycheck than the guy who went to UTI, got an auto mechanic degree, and now makes ninety grand a year fixing Audis, but it does allow you entry into the sort of jobs that rich whites do when their parents subsidize them - non-profits, etc.
Me? I'm just a working darkie, and I think it's all silly.
I do have, as the above commentator says, major snobbery. All science grads do. It's called the pyramid of disdain.
Math majors look down on physics majors.
Physics majors look down on chem majors.
Chem majors look down on bio majors.
Bio majors look down on social science majors.
Social science majors can't, and don't count.
As you probably guessed, I majored in math.
Megan's post and comments on this blog simply confirm old adage that everybody hates a winner.
secret asian man: all well and good what you say, but just out of curiosity, what are the marketable skills from being a math major?
"What's with all the Rutgers people in this string? Are we perpetually condemned to have Princeton envy?"
Bruce Bartlett,
When I was at Cook College, Rutgers University, I had Rutgers College envy, not Princeton envy. I daydreamed of majoring in something fun and easy like English, which Cook -- a land grant Ag and Environmental Sciences school -- didn't offer. I could have transfered to Rutgers College, had the required core science classes at Cook not helped me dig an early hole for my GPA... something that would bite me in the ass years later. One of the downsides of Rutgers U. (particularly in math and the hard sciences) was lack of any grade inflation. I remember a pre-med student who transfered from an elite private college (Franklin & Marshall, if memory serves) and was stunned with his first semester's grades.
"UChicago and NYU also boast better undergrad programs than Harvard or Yale (but inferior to Princeton, probably, as much as I hate Princeton.)"
I have no idea how their undergraduate educations compare. It does seem that NYU undergrads have the highest suicide rates.
"Has anyone done a basic time-value calculation?"
This is done with graduate business schools all the time, by various periodicals. According to one periodical's calculations (The Financial Times, I think), The University of Iowa's MBA program had the highest return on investment of all full time programs. Those grads didn't make as much as the top school grads, on average, but since they earned less, on average, before they went in, their opportunity cost was lower; also, since Iowa's tuition was about half that of the top-tier private schools' their investment was lower. I think the overall winner in ROI was a top part-time program, NYU's, since there was no forgone salary.
"A lit degree from Brown is as useless as a lit degree from community college, in terms of marketable skills."
But the degree from Brown makes you more marketable. Particularly since Griggs v. Duke Power, an elite college degree is often used as a proxy for intelligence.
"what are the marketable skills from being a math major?"
In fields like quantitative finance, a math degree with a high GPA from a decent school will get you a high-paying job out of college, even with no finance-specific knowledge.
I don't think snobbery is limited to any one school or institution. Every industry and/or region ofetn has a status college or employer. I own a recruiting firm out side of Philly and for us here, it's definitely Penn.
It does get amusing/annoying how candidates for jobs will identify any connection with Penn that they can find in their backgrounds and then get it into the conversation as quickly as possible.
Last year there was the fellow applying for an engineering job who absolutely had to tell me that they had moved to the area because HIS WIFE WORKS AT PENN!!! I heard that 4 times in 5 minutes.
The year before there was the fellow who had no relation to Penn except living in the neighborhood. For some reason he needed to let me know HE LIVED NEAR PENN!!! twice in our first conversation.
I'm an engineer in the oil industry and we are more concerned with experience and ability than with where someone went to college. Texas has some very good engineering programs at state schools and some good private engineering schools. There's a lot of rivalries, but not a lot of snobbery.
As far as Ivy League schools go, we usually run into them when some MBA comes in and thinks that what he learned in school can immediately be applied to any given company. Unfortunately for them, we don't make widgets in a model economy... but most of them end up figuring that out - eventually.
EI
I once heard a Harvard grad say (presumably by accident):
"You know, when I was in school in Boston, I liked to eat beagles . . . "
[Disclaimer: I did a 6-week executive course at HBS about ten years ago. At no time did I even consider eating a beagle, although that may have been because I had a beagle growing up and was very fond of it.]
The ivy league schools do seem to loom large on the east coast. but in chicago or L.A., a degree of university of illinois or UCLA doesn't appear deficient in comparison to a degree from Dartmouth or Brown.
As Slocum hints, the Ivy League does carry weight there, except they think that Stanford, Duke and MIT are Ivies and Dartmouth and Brown aren't.
This walking idiot has full alumni status.
No he doesn't, although he probably sincerely thinks he does.
One of my good friends moved to Boston immediately after graduating from Virginia Tech with a double-major in Architecture and English. She couldn't find a job for the whole 9 months she was there. When she moved back to Northern Virginia she landed a job within a week.
EI,
When it comes to colleges and universities with excellent programs in hard sciences and engineering, America has an embarrassment of riches. Often the top schools in many of these fields are state schools.
BTW, as an engineer in the oil industry, what are your thoughts on Vaalco Energy (EGY)? I picked up some shares at $4 a couple of months ago.
Christina,
I don't know much about Virginia Tech, but the University of Virginia has very well-regarded grad schools in business and in law.
This made me laugh. I recently dated a Harvard man, and he mentioned it a LOT. It was amusing at first, and then it became annoying, but ultimately it was a little sad, because he really seemed to think his Harvard degree was the best thing about him.
He was at a reunion in June and brought me back a Harvard T-shirt. (This probably says it all.) I like the shirt, but I feel weird wearing it because I don't want people to think I went there. There's too much baggage that goes with Harvard.
Not to be hypocritical about hypocritically accusing other people of hypocrisy, but...
And don't get me started on the people from Harvard Business School, who, unbeknownst to themselves, were the source of untold hilarity at each and every summer internship program, as they strove to reassure us that they thought that our MBA program was every bit as good as Harvard, honestly.
Followed by:
But really, who cares? As far as I can tell, an Ivy league degree is at best a modest boost....few of the smartest and most talented people I know have Ivy League degrees; it seems to be a better indicator of where you started out than where you'll end up.
Thanks for striving to reassure us that you think our degrees are every bit as good as yours. And for being the source of untold hilarity! Condescension for me, but not for thee, etc.
As a Princetonian settled in Chicago, I can vouch that people here really don't care. I lived in Washington and I found the Ivy snobbery (and the many other kinds of snobbery) really off-putting. Washington is a very status-concious city, it seemed to me. D or R? WHO do you work for? (Not "what do you do?") Where did you go to school? Often these questions preceded the customary exchange of names...