[andrewmcwatters]

This isn’t a problem we as Americans need to fix. It fixes itself. For instance, the average Ivy League graduate only makes marginally more money than your public school graduate.

By the time you’re making even low 6 figures, the idea of interacting with an Stanford grad who has done nothing of note with their education and makes something comparable to you is quaint.

Generally speaking, distribution of US income as a proxy for social standing gets you pretty far.

At the end of the day, being associated with prestige is cute (working for a big name) and perhaps what many people desire, but holding it yourself manifests itself in different ways at the individual level. Those who really have any modicum of power don’t care about baseless associations.

“Yeah you worked for a FAANG, great, but what have you accomplished?”

[scarmig]

> the average Ivy League graduate only makes marginally more money than your public school graduate

I'm pretty sure that's not true. I doubt there's much of an actual value-add in going to an elite school, but the average incomes of graduates of them are substantially higher than that of random public school graduates.

https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors

[gnicholas]

You are correct that GP's statement is wrong. But research from 2011 showed that this may be largely due the fact that students going into Ivy League schools are more likely to be high achieving in the first place. [1]

> What they found was that two students with similar backgrounds, grades and test scores who applied to the same mix of selective and nonselective schools earned about the same later on, even if the first attended a selective school and the second didn’t. The choice of schools applied to was indicative of ambition which, they argue, is a more powerful driver of success than the school they attend. “The return to college selectivity [is] indistinguishable from zero,” they wrote in 2011.

However, researchers noted that for certain students, going to a more elite school did generate greater returns.

> focusing only on the benefits to the wealthy may miss the full picture. Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger found that African-American and Hispanic students, and those whose parents didn’t go to college, actually did enjoy an income boost from a selective college, perhaps, the researchers said, owing to networking opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t have had.

1: https://outline.com/wWr2v3

[andrewmcwatters]

Fascinating, most of the top schools are engineering heavy, and their mid-career pays are exactly inline with engineering pay.

Who would have thought?

[hailwren]

Yes, and the gap grows even wider when you normalize for per-professional degree percentages (i.e. STEM/pharm/premed/prelaw/military inflating the bottom half of the curve)

[rhizome]

I'd also be interested to see the rates of claiming unemployment benefits across that spectrum.

[nitrogen]

My mediocre high school used to give presentations about how pointless it was to go to a big name school. One of the claims was that, after ten years, all differences in median incomes were gone. Curiously they didn't break it down into percentiles.

Everyone in the advisors' office bought into this public-school-to-public-university pipeline. My dream in junior high was to go to MIT. When I mentioned this to my guidance counselor, they said, basically, "Don't bother, you'll never get in." Self-fulfilling prophecy.

[tomp]

They were just managing expectations. Partially the kids’, partially the parents’

[nitrogen]

Managing expectations would be "Here's a plan to maximize your chances, but the chances are still slim, so pick several schools."

[Spooky23]

They were right.

The 90th percentile earner from the Harvard class of 2010 didn’t come from some random high school in Missouri with an 1000 median SAT score.

Guidance counselors suck every where. Mine was a national guard major, 18% of my class joined the military.

[nitrogen]

Medians are misleading. Some random high school in Missouri probably has outliers that it just doesn't know how to deal with. Additionally, maintaining low expectations perpetuates a cycle of underachievement.

[whimsicalism]

> the average Ivy League graduate only makes marginally more money than your public school graduate.

Sorry, what? The average Ivy League graduate makes substantially more than your average non-Ivy graduate.

I don't even understand what your second sentence is trying to say.

[sgerenser]

I believe he probably got the statistic mixed up. The average Ivy League graduate does indeed make more than the average non-ivy college graduate. But they make about the same (or are about as successful, can’t remember the exact statistic) as someone who got accepted to an Ivy but went elsewhere.

[andrewmcwatters]

No, I mean the actual starting salaries based on employment data from universities themselves tell us there’s only a marginal difference in those who graduate between the institutions.

If you look at the degrees themselves as a form of capital investment, Ivy League schools don’t translate into “paying off,” as it were.

[whimsicalism]

> No, I mean the actual starting salaries based on employment data from universities themselves tell us there’s only a marginal difference in those who graduate between the institutions.

Not only is that not true, but Harvard new grads make substantially more than the average BA holder, including people who are 2 decades into their career.

[hailwren]

Yes, and pairwise multivariate comparisons make the gap even larger. (i.e. considering two engineering students or two visual arts students etc)

[jcheng]

Here’s one source that says the difference is significant, to put it mildly. Do you have a better source you can cite?

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166027-Harvard-Unive...

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?240444-University-of...

Edit: Actually the third state school I looked up is not far off! https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?236948-University-of...

[desert_boi]

Picking "Public Ivyies" is stacking the deck a bit, no? My "third tier" school has a median of about half of what Harvard does.

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?142115-Boise-State-U...

[andrewmcwatters]

What are you talking about? Those are distributions; and they swing just as wildly as the broader US workforce. These people aren't making 250k out of the door, nor mid-career. It's just not impressive.

[gnicholas]

Cite supporting your statement: https://outline.com/wWr2v3

[akhilcacharya]

What’s the play if I didn’t get accepted into an Ivy tier school but want to make as much as them?

What’s a benchmark?