Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Boston
Posts: 7349

Vegas
The Impatient Generation (Part 1)

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Registered: May 2002
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Posts: 9138

Kudos for addressing the impatience of our generation without once mentioning MTv.

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Boston
Posts: 7349

I didn't have MTV until I was in high school. I'll be sure to bring it up in one of my future posts.

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Registered: Apr 2005
Location: europa
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so what would you change?

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Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Hilbert Space
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On the plus side, people that go to the best 30-some colleges and perform well whilst there tend to do OK, even with the increased debtload they may have from attending one of those colleges. So long as things are good for the best people, who cares about the rest, really? Public restrooms will always need cleaning, so it's not like they won't be able to find something to do.

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Registered: Mar 2004
Location: Still Orygun
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I'm too impatient to read that claptrap.

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Boston
Posts: 7349

dogcow - I'll answer that soon.

Smug - I do not have a link to this data: a study showed that where someone goes to college greatly affects their job prospects and advancement for their first two years after graduating. Beyond that, it's all about experience, networking, and hard-work.

mouse - put down the bong and the deep-fried Oreos. Read again in the morning; your state of mind will have improved by then.

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Registered: Mar 2004
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quote:

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Originally posted by Vegas
deep-fried Oreos

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: Disgusting den of creepitude
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Deep fried twinkies are much better.

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Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:

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Originally posted by Vegas
Smug - I do not have a link to this data: a study showed that where someone goes to college greatly affects their job prospects and advancement for their first two years after graduating. Beyond that, it's all about experience, networking, and hard-work.

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Registered: Feb 2001
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quote:

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Originally posted by Smug Git
It's always hard to separate intrinsic worth from that stuff, but those first two years are key for a lot of careers; if you don't get the first two years in, say, a premier management consultancy or brokerage or executive fast-track program or government department, there isn't any 'beyond that'. So, sure, the top schools produce better people because they are more selective from their intake in any case, but while you don't generally get promoted based on academic heritage if you're incompetent, it's a hell of a lot easier to get into the career stream in the first place if you have that education. Which is why, of course, many students would cut each other's throats to get into those places, because of the benefits of being there (a situation that is getting worse, in effect, as employers increase in their obsessive valuation of applicants by formal education, for many careers).

The students who will suffer most are those that pay top-dollar to get into lesser colleges (because many lesser colleges don't cost substantially less than the best colleges). Those people will get a lot of debt for little eventual benefit.

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Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Hilbert Space
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The people to ask about that are HR people (and when I've spoken to them, which I did quite a lot when I came here to get a feel for the jobs market, they have been very clear about the importance of school reputation, which suits me well enough if they care to look at the rankings). People who succeed have all sorts of ideas about why they've done well and they'll mostly attribute it to things that make them feel good about themselves (similarly, people who fail will do the same sort of thing). Most people who get ahead with contributions from connections, nepotism or old-school tie won't proclaim the fact; the boardrooms of the best companies in the nation are, nevertheless, disproportionately staffed by people from those institutions. Now, so relatively few people attend the top twenty to thirty or so schools that there's still plenty of senior people who didn't go to one; the issue is one of probabilities. If you're going to spend circa thirty grand a year for undergrad, you will get much better value for it if you go to an Ivy or Stanford, Chicago, etc, than if you go to one of many other thirty grand a year schools (and if you're at a 15 grand a year school, that only makes sense if you couldn't get into one of the good thirty grand a year ones). I guess that it's a bigger deal for the fast track at the big companies, the Goldman Sachs, Johnson and Johnson, etc, than for still big, but less first tier, sorts of companies. After all, there's only a couple of thousand Princeton grads a year, I think, so there's not really enough to go around...

Incidentally, there's also a high correlation between academic trajectory for researchers and the quality of institution at which they end up. People who step off and go to a less-renowned research institution are generally making life harder for themselves than those who stay in the top research institutions (and there's less of them than good undergrad colleges because Liberal Arts universities don't do close to as much academic research). This is pretty heinous in some respects, given that academics themselves should know that at least some of the reputation business is a big bogus, except that because everyone knows that the correlation is there, people who still step off the high-flying trajectory probably didn't, on average, have a great deal of choice. When there's hundreds of applications coming in for the best jobs, you have to be able to trash nearly all of them quickly somehow.

Last edited by Smug Git on 01-25-2008 at 03:44 AM

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