What are the differences between the ‘big names’ of higher education, in comparison to other places?
For example, I often hear about MIT, Oxford, and to a lesser extent, Cambridge. Either there’s some sort of self-selection, or do graduates from there have better prospects than graduates of ‘University of X, YZ’?
In a little bit of unintended self-reflection I noticed that I have a strange binary way of thinking of higher education. It feels that if I don’t go to one of the top n, my effort is wasted. Not sure why.
I’m just becoming somewhat paranoid regarding the real world after reading HPMOR because I always get a ‘how much do I really know?’ feeling. I’m not sure how my impressions were formed and I better double-check how well does the ideas in my mind reflect the real-world truth but at the same time I’m not even sure what’s a reliable indicator.
Post-high education LWers, do you think the place you studied at had a significant effect on your future prospects?
I studied at Cambridge (which, btw, is definitely better than Oxford :-)).[1] Being in the Cambridge area when I got out of academia meant that there were plenty of jobs around that suited me. (Obviously that’s a good thing in itself, but perhaps if I’d been somewhere else then I’d have moved to, say, London and had a different range of job opportunities.)
Pretty much every job I’ve taken I’ve found out about because someone at my new employer knew me. In some cases those were people who studied with me. Does that count as an effect of having been at a good university? I don’t know—if I’d been somewhere else, presumably other people would have known me, and maybe they’d have been even more impressed for want of strong competition :-). But there are lots of Cambridge people in Cambridge jobs, for obvious reasons.
The point here is that lots of things useful to my career have arisen from my having gone to a good university—but not in the obvious way (people looking at my history and saying “oooh, Cambridge PhD, must be very smart”).
[1] It occurs to me that there is a slight danger of that being taken more seriously than I intend it, so let me mention that Oxford and Cambridge are traditional rivals and that of course I would say Cambridge is obviously better. My actual opinion is that Cambridge is somewhat better for maths, science, technology, engineering, while Oxford is better for classics, history, politics, etc. If you want to be prime minister, go to Oxford. If you want to start a billion-dollar tech company, go to Cambridge. I’m not sure how they compare for intermediate fields like philosophy and law.
Thanks for the long answer! I just looked at the Cambridge prices for overseas students and it made me feel poor. Might as well seen a 500,000 ILS debt in my bank account.
I live in Israel and maybe I should study here. None of my family has any education though so I’m not really sure what to do. Do you know any universal things I should look for when considering higher education? (‘Is it worth it?’ sounds like a good question now..)
Yeah, Cambridge is pretty expensive. (I think the best US universities are a lot worse, but haven’t actually looked at the numbers. Some or all of these places may have some kind of assistance available if you’re very poor or very good or both.) The recent reduction in the value of the pound (because of all the “Brexit” hoohah) has made UK universities a bit cheaper for foreign students.
I’d hesitate to call anything universal, but I’d consider at least the following things. You’ve probably thought of them all already :-). Some of them are awfully hard to assess. You may be able to get useful answers to some of them from the universities themselves, though of course it may be in their interests to mislead you or to refuse to answer some kinds of question.
How well do the courses available match what I am actually interested in learning?
What possible career paths might I follow, and will going [wherever] and studying [whatever] help with them? (Be realistic!)
Will I enjoy my time there? (This depends on things like climate, culture, difficulty of course, interestingness of course, other people there, …)
Will I meet plenty of people who will be friends, mentors, useful future contacts, etc.? (How much this matters, and how much use you can make of the meeting-people opportunities, depends on your goals, personality, etc.)
Will my having gone there impress people? Will I care?
Will the academic work be too easy or too difficult for me?
Is it assessed in ways I can do well at? (I’m not sure how much this varies. But e.g. there may be variation in whether it’s only your final year’s examinations that count; in whether there’s coursework as well as examinations; in whether some examinations are “open book”.)
How much will it cost? (Take into account any scholarships, bursaries, loans, etc., available to you.)
If while there I find that I want to be doing something else, how flexible will they be? (At some universities, perhaps all, it’s pretty easy to change subjects, at least if you’re moving from a “harder” to an “easier” subject.)
Will they actually have me? If it’s uncertain, am I giving up better opportunities by trying?
If the university is abroad, will I face prejudice from the locals? Or feel prejudice myself against the locals? How comfortable am I in the local language? How comfortable am I with the local culture? Will the food etc. be OK for me?
How do they teach? What’s the actual quality of teaching like? Will I be being taught by world expert researchers or struggling graduate students? (Note: the former are not necessarily better teachers.)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but your comment here gives me the impression that you are asking an awfully general question, but actually want the answer to a very concrete question: “Should I study X at a top uni abroad, any uni at home, or not at all, given that I’m good enough to choose myself but will have to make debts to study”. This would be a much easier question for us to answer, especially if you tell us what X is, whether you’d want to continue with a postgrad, and maybe what you goals are for the time after your studies. It’s perfectly ok not to know all of these yet, but some info would help.
Oxbridge and other UK universities are chronically underfunded because of regulations about how much they can charge domestic students, so they try to make up for it by charging foreign students big money. My guess is that elite US universities are much better value-for-money for foreign students.
I just looked at the Cambridge prices for overseas students and it made me feel poor. Might as well seen a 500,000 ILS debt in my bank account.
You might be able to get financial aid or scholarships, so I wouldn’t rule out an expensive university right away. If you apply and get accepted, which admittedly itself costs some money, then you could have some talks with the financial aid people. And their first answer may not be the final answer, or there may be alternative sources of funding, so you may have to repeat yourself and keep talking to them for a while before you together figure out something that could work. Some universities claim to have the attitude that they don’t want anyone to not be able to attend because of financial reasons, but in practice it is hit and miss to get them to live up to it, and easy to get into debt. It may depend on the individual person you are talking to. If one person isn’t helping much, a different person in the same department may help more. Sometimes people unfamiliar with the system get discouraged by the first thing someone in financial aid says to them and walk away, instead of advocating for themselves more, or exploring the problem from a slightly different angle.
You may also want to look into universities that have a co-operative education program that involves paid work in between sessions of study. This won’t completely pay for the costs of education, but it can help a lot.
I’m currently applying for jobs while finishing up my Master’s degree, so I’m not technically in the group you are asking, but can hopefully still say something useful.
Background:
I’ve been studying Computer Science with a natural language focus, both at a relatively unknown university in Eastern Germany and at University of Edinburgh. The latter is definitely top n in the field, although it does not have the same nimbus and does not offer as much of regular 1-on-1 teaching time with profs like Oxford and Cambridge do (you can get it if you ask, but it is not a default teaching mode). I can’t compare to the US because I haven’t been there yet.
Content comparison:
I find that the courses at both universities is similar both according to content and quality. The focus is different of course, and workload is much higher in Edinburgh, probably because the degree program is only 1 year instead of 1.5 or 2 for roughly the same content. In both places I could get meetings with professors if I wanted to, although in Edinburgh there is additionally a lot of staff who checks up on us and reminds us about organisational things. Among students, there is a bigger share of really bright and enthusiastic people, and that is quite noticeable. The biggest difference here is that there is direct contact with the people who made major inventions and contributions to the field and are on top of things I actually care about. This is most important in a very narrow range of topics I want to go further. For the basics, it doesn’t really matter who explains them. I currently also get very good dissertation supervision, but I cannot compare that to my old university because I wrote my dissertation there during an internship and largely with supervision from the company’s research department.
Job applications:
I feel like being in Edinburgh gives a significant boost to job applications. In Germany, profs were willing to write recommendations on request, but did not offer interesting company contacts on their own. There were partnerships between university and bigger companies, but this felt very cheesy and ineffective. Around here, I do get very cool company introductions and interviewers sometimes happen to have worked or studied here as well, which gives a good basis for conversation and might give a bonus, even if they try to avoid it consciously.
Conclusion:
UK tuition fees at top-n universities (around £7k-25k/year) are low compared to US fees, so they are easier to justify and I think mine are worth it with regards to my future job. I would not say the same for knowledge gain per money, since German living costs are much lower and it does not have tuition fees. I could have done a two-year master in Germany for less money and could have had more relaxed studies with the same gain. I however wanted to have shorter, intensive studies, so the UK suited my preferences. Be aware however that Brexit causes trouble for British research, so this evaluation might totally change in 1 or 2 years.
There’s a lot of self-selection, and the classes and extracurricular resources are therefore allowed to be geared towards smarter students, and that’s nice. You’ll also get more opportunities to learn about current research in your chosen field, which improves your grad school chances.
A lot of the value is if you plan to get a job straight out of college, going to a top n school will have a name brand advantage (not without reason).
However, controlling for smartness and research experience, I think that where you did your undergrad doesn’t matter all that much for grad school.
I talked to a person who was hiring for tech jobs in Silicon Valley, and he said that the Ivy League schools in the United States get a much better quality of training than other United States schools in the fields of engineering and computer science. For example, the Ivy League schools would have 3 hour exams where you have to show how you arrived at an answer as well as the answer. Most of the other schools had 1 hour multiple choice exams.
The situation is different in other countries. In Canada, unlike in the US, engineering is a regulated profession. That means certain types of designs have to be approved by a Professional Engineer. There are rules about how to become a professional engineer. One path to becoming one involves graduating from an accredited program at a university. So every engineering program at a university is monitored by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board. No matter which university you go to in Canada, you’ll get the 3 hour non-multiple choice exams, and very good training.
For this reason, the person at the tech company liked to hire Canadians, since they have the good training, but not the entitled attitude of the Ivy League graduates. But he considered Ivy League graduates. He wouldn’t even consider the non-Ivy League ones, unless they showed some other way that they actually have the skills and training, since they didn’t get it at school.
Another difference between Harvard, MIT, etc. and the typical Canadian university is that Harvard and MIT have huge endowment funds and many wealthy alumni and donors, so they have access to a lot more resources than most universities. Like about 1000x more money. The MIT endowment fund reached $13.5 billion in 2015.
I also know someone who went to Harvard for a Masters degree in political science, and she said that after getting a degree from Harvard, she was taken a lot more seriously. People listened to what she said, and deferred to her, in a way that they didn’t before she could say that she went to Harvard. So it seems to make a difference in public policy and government work.
Another difference between universities can be their intellectual property policy. The University of Waterloo, in Canada, has the most respectful intellectual property policy that I know of, among universities. Simply, if you do research or work there, it’s yours, and you can use it in a startup company if you wish. Many students and professors do this. The University of Waterloo is well known for many technology spinoff companies. I know of one prof who doesn’t even publish journal articles any more, he just documents his work with patents, and then uses them in his startup. This is seen as adding prestige to the institution, unlike in some other universities, where there’s a bit more disdain for commercialization. The co-op program at the University of Waterloo also means that students get real-world experience and bring that back to the classroom, and is another reason for the more positive attitude to collaboration with industry.
The University of Waterloo’s intellectual property policy is even more respectful and individualistic than the one at Stanford, which is also a university known for its spinoffs.
Oxford has more name recognition in North America than Cambridge. Within the UK, they are seen as mostly equivalent, to the point that “Oxford and/or Cambridge” is often shortened to “Oxbridge”. It is easier to get work in government in the UK with an Oxbridge education.
Also, the people you meet at university are more likely to end up in powerful positions if you go to one of the big name universities. So the alumni network becomes more valuable.
It depends on what you want to study and what you want to do afterward. There are some fields where it wouldn’t matter much.
Graduate education is a different matter. With some exceptions, like my friend who went to Harvard for political science that I mentioned above, it doesn’t really matter much what school or department you go to for graduate school. The most important things will be
1) What did you do?
and
2) Who did you work with?
The rest is almost irrelevant. Finding a good supervisor who you can get along with, and who will help your career, is the priority when choosing graduate school.
I’m most familiar with Canada, and a bit with the US and the UK. I don’t know the situation in other countries.
What do you actually want to do with your life? There are careers like politics where personal connection that are gathered during university years are very important.
There are other careers such as starting a startup where personal connections with high status people might not be central and a lot of the YC founders don’t have them.
Either there’s some sort of self-selection, or do graduates from there have better prospects than graduates of ‘University of X, YZ’?
Post-high education LWers, do you think the place you studied at had a significant effect on your future prospects?
I went to Melbourne University and did an exchange program to UCSD. So I have comparison. I think the distribution of the quality of teaching is sufficiently narrow that it should not play a major factor..
There are careers like politics where personal connection that are gathered during university years are very important.
Depending on the job and your part of the world, personal connection might be a very important factor in carer success. It is more likely that you will would gain more, better personal connection in better university.
Wait what? How are you supposed to meet your co-founder / early employees without connections? College is like the ideal place to meet people to start start-ups with.
Wait what? How are you supposed to meet your co-founder / early employees without connections? College is like the ideal place to meet people to start start-ups with.
Meeting a cofounder is useful and college can help with that but I don’t think that you have a huge advantage from being at Oxford compared to being at any other decent university.
This may be true if you want to go into research or in primarily reputation-based fields like politics and law. In engineering or technology, you’ll be totally fine and get a reasonable job with a degree from other universities. Maybe in the US it’s not worth the fees, but that’s a different matter and does not apply in many countries.
To clarify, what I meant was:
Are the famous, top n, or places for education do provide a substantially better outcome for their students on average in comparison to less exceptional ones?
Sure, but the question wasn’t what would get you a reasonable job. The question was whether graduates from top schools have “better prospects” than graduates from no-name schools and yes, they do.
True, though I think the real question is “better by how much” :-) If, given the ability, the top schools provide no better prospects, then (a) The common advice of “go to the best school which accepts you” is misguided and (2) the top schools have been running a marvelously successful con for decades and even centuries.
The answer to the question “do I get anything valuable from going to a better university?” might of course differ according to what it is you value; e.g., it could turn out that the “best” ones do a better job of preparing you for academic research but are no better for your out-of-academia career prospects, or vice versa.
(As it happens, I agree with you that they probably do have genuine advantages whether you’re looking to maximize learning, future job prospects, useful contacts, or whatever.)
It somewhat depends on the specialty, but standard college rankings will get you into the ballpark. Look at things like selectivity (% of applicants offered admission) and the distribution of standardized test scores for students.
What are the differences between the ‘big names’ of higher education, in comparison to other places?
For example, I often hear about MIT, Oxford, and to a lesser extent, Cambridge. Either there’s some sort of self-selection, or do graduates from there have better prospects than graduates of ‘University of X, YZ’?
In a little bit of unintended self-reflection I noticed that I have a strange binary way of thinking of higher education. It feels that if I don’t go to one of the top n, my effort is wasted. Not sure why.
I’m just becoming somewhat paranoid regarding the real world after reading HPMOR because I always get a ‘how much do I really know?’ feeling. I’m not sure how my impressions were formed and I better double-check how well does the ideas in my mind reflect the real-world truth but at the same time I’m not even sure what’s a reliable indicator.
Post-high education LWers, do you think the place you studied at had a significant effect on your future prospects?
I studied at Cambridge (which, btw, is definitely better than Oxford :-)).[1] Being in the Cambridge area when I got out of academia meant that there were plenty of jobs around that suited me. (Obviously that’s a good thing in itself, but perhaps if I’d been somewhere else then I’d have moved to, say, London and had a different range of job opportunities.)
Pretty much every job I’ve taken I’ve found out about because someone at my new employer knew me. In some cases those were people who studied with me. Does that count as an effect of having been at a good university? I don’t know—if I’d been somewhere else, presumably other people would have known me, and maybe they’d have been even more impressed for want of strong competition :-). But there are lots of Cambridge people in Cambridge jobs, for obvious reasons.
The point here is that lots of things useful to my career have arisen from my having gone to a good university—but not in the obvious way (people looking at my history and saying “oooh, Cambridge PhD, must be very smart”).
[1] It occurs to me that there is a slight danger of that being taken more seriously than I intend it, so let me mention that Oxford and Cambridge are traditional rivals and that of course I would say Cambridge is obviously better. My actual opinion is that Cambridge is somewhat better for maths, science, technology, engineering, while Oxford is better for classics, history, politics, etc. If you want to be prime minister, go to Oxford. If you want to start a billion-dollar tech company, go to Cambridge. I’m not sure how they compare for intermediate fields like philosophy and law.
Thanks for the long answer! I just looked at the Cambridge prices for overseas students and it made me feel poor. Might as well seen a 500,000 ILS debt in my bank account.
I live in Israel and maybe I should study here. None of my family has any education though so I’m not really sure what to do. Do you know any universal things I should look for when considering higher education? (‘Is it worth it?’ sounds like a good question now..)
Yeah, Cambridge is pretty expensive. (I think the best US universities are a lot worse, but haven’t actually looked at the numbers. Some or all of these places may have some kind of assistance available if you’re very poor or very good or both.) The recent reduction in the value of the pound (because of all the “Brexit” hoohah) has made UK universities a bit cheaper for foreign students.
I’d hesitate to call anything universal, but I’d consider at least the following things. You’ve probably thought of them all already :-). Some of them are awfully hard to assess. You may be able to get useful answers to some of them from the universities themselves, though of course it may be in their interests to mislead you or to refuse to answer some kinds of question.
How well do the courses available match what I am actually interested in learning?
What possible career paths might I follow, and will going [wherever] and studying [whatever] help with them? (Be realistic!)
Will I enjoy my time there? (This depends on things like climate, culture, difficulty of course, interestingness of course, other people there, …)
Will I meet plenty of people who will be friends, mentors, useful future contacts, etc.? (How much this matters, and how much use you can make of the meeting-people opportunities, depends on your goals, personality, etc.)
Will my having gone there impress people? Will I care?
Will the academic work be too easy or too difficult for me?
Is it assessed in ways I can do well at? (I’m not sure how much this varies. But e.g. there may be variation in whether it’s only your final year’s examinations that count; in whether there’s coursework as well as examinations; in whether some examinations are “open book”.)
How much will it cost? (Take into account any scholarships, bursaries, loans, etc., available to you.)
If while there I find that I want to be doing something else, how flexible will they be? (At some universities, perhaps all, it’s pretty easy to change subjects, at least if you’re moving from a “harder” to an “easier” subject.)
Will they actually have me? If it’s uncertain, am I giving up better opportunities by trying?
If the university is abroad, will I face prejudice from the locals? Or feel prejudice myself against the locals? How comfortable am I in the local language? How comfortable am I with the local culture? Will the food etc. be OK for me?
How do they teach? What’s the actual quality of teaching like? Will I be being taught by world expert researchers or struggling graduate students? (Note: the former are not necessarily better teachers.)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but your comment here gives me the impression that you are asking an awfully general question, but actually want the answer to a very concrete question: “Should I study X at a top uni abroad, any uni at home, or not at all, given that I’m good enough to choose myself but will have to make debts to study”. This would be a much easier question for us to answer, especially if you tell us what X is, whether you’d want to continue with a postgrad, and maybe what you goals are for the time after your studies. It’s perfectly ok not to know all of these yet, but some info would help.
Israel has great tech universities.
Oxbridge and other UK universities are chronically underfunded because of regulations about how much they can charge domestic students, so they try to make up for it by charging foreign students big money. My guess is that elite US universities are much better value-for-money for foreign students.
You might be able to get financial aid or scholarships, so I wouldn’t rule out an expensive university right away. If you apply and get accepted, which admittedly itself costs some money, then you could have some talks with the financial aid people. And their first answer may not be the final answer, or there may be alternative sources of funding, so you may have to repeat yourself and keep talking to them for a while before you together figure out something that could work. Some universities claim to have the attitude that they don’t want anyone to not be able to attend because of financial reasons, but in practice it is hit and miss to get them to live up to it, and easy to get into debt. It may depend on the individual person you are talking to. If one person isn’t helping much, a different person in the same department may help more. Sometimes people unfamiliar with the system get discouraged by the first thing someone in financial aid says to them and walk away, instead of advocating for themselves more, or exploring the problem from a slightly different angle.
You may also want to look into universities that have a co-operative education program that involves paid work in between sessions of study. This won’t completely pay for the costs of education, but it can help a lot.
I’m currently applying for jobs while finishing up my Master’s degree, so I’m not technically in the group you are asking, but can hopefully still say something useful.
Background: I’ve been studying Computer Science with a natural language focus, both at a relatively unknown university in Eastern Germany and at University of Edinburgh. The latter is definitely top n in the field, although it does not have the same nimbus and does not offer as much of regular 1-on-1 teaching time with profs like Oxford and Cambridge do (you can get it if you ask, but it is not a default teaching mode). I can’t compare to the US because I haven’t been there yet.
Content comparison: I find that the courses at both universities is similar both according to content and quality. The focus is different of course, and workload is much higher in Edinburgh, probably because the degree program is only 1 year instead of 1.5 or 2 for roughly the same content. In both places I could get meetings with professors if I wanted to, although in Edinburgh there is additionally a lot of staff who checks up on us and reminds us about organisational things. Among students, there is a bigger share of really bright and enthusiastic people, and that is quite noticeable. The biggest difference here is that there is direct contact with the people who made major inventions and contributions to the field and are on top of things I actually care about. This is most important in a very narrow range of topics I want to go further. For the basics, it doesn’t really matter who explains them. I currently also get very good dissertation supervision, but I cannot compare that to my old university because I wrote my dissertation there during an internship and largely with supervision from the company’s research department.
Job applications: I feel like being in Edinburgh gives a significant boost to job applications. In Germany, profs were willing to write recommendations on request, but did not offer interesting company contacts on their own. There were partnerships between university and bigger companies, but this felt very cheesy and ineffective. Around here, I do get very cool company introductions and interviewers sometimes happen to have worked or studied here as well, which gives a good basis for conversation and might give a bonus, even if they try to avoid it consciously.
Conclusion: UK tuition fees at top-n universities (around £7k-25k/year) are low compared to US fees, so they are easier to justify and I think mine are worth it with regards to my future job. I would not say the same for knowledge gain per money, since German living costs are much lower and it does not have tuition fees. I could have done a two-year master in Germany for less money and could have had more relaxed studies with the same gain. I however wanted to have shorter, intensive studies, so the UK suited my preferences. Be aware however that Brexit causes trouble for British research, so this evaluation might totally change in 1 or 2 years.
http://siderea.livejournal.com/1261773.html?format=light
useful thoughts about colleges.
There’s a lot of self-selection, and the classes and extracurricular resources are therefore allowed to be geared towards smarter students, and that’s nice. You’ll also get more opportunities to learn about current research in your chosen field, which improves your grad school chances.
A lot of the value is if you plan to get a job straight out of college, going to a top n school will have a name brand advantage (not without reason).
However, controlling for smartness and research experience, I think that where you did your undergrad doesn’t matter all that much for grad school.
Yes, there are differences.
I talked to a person who was hiring for tech jobs in Silicon Valley, and he said that the Ivy League schools in the United States get a much better quality of training than other United States schools in the fields of engineering and computer science. For example, the Ivy League schools would have 3 hour exams where you have to show how you arrived at an answer as well as the answer. Most of the other schools had 1 hour multiple choice exams.
The situation is different in other countries. In Canada, unlike in the US, engineering is a regulated profession. That means certain types of designs have to be approved by a Professional Engineer. There are rules about how to become a professional engineer. One path to becoming one involves graduating from an accredited program at a university. So every engineering program at a university is monitored by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board. No matter which university you go to in Canada, you’ll get the 3 hour non-multiple choice exams, and very good training.
For this reason, the person at the tech company liked to hire Canadians, since they have the good training, but not the entitled attitude of the Ivy League graduates. But he considered Ivy League graduates. He wouldn’t even consider the non-Ivy League ones, unless they showed some other way that they actually have the skills and training, since they didn’t get it at school.
Another difference between Harvard, MIT, etc. and the typical Canadian university is that Harvard and MIT have huge endowment funds and many wealthy alumni and donors, so they have access to a lot more resources than most universities. Like about 1000x more money. The MIT endowment fund reached $13.5 billion in 2015.
I also know someone who went to Harvard for a Masters degree in political science, and she said that after getting a degree from Harvard, she was taken a lot more seriously. People listened to what she said, and deferred to her, in a way that they didn’t before she could say that she went to Harvard. So it seems to make a difference in public policy and government work.
Another difference between universities can be their intellectual property policy. The University of Waterloo, in Canada, has the most respectful intellectual property policy that I know of, among universities. Simply, if you do research or work there, it’s yours, and you can use it in a startup company if you wish. Many students and professors do this. The University of Waterloo is well known for many technology spinoff companies. I know of one prof who doesn’t even publish journal articles any more, he just documents his work with patents, and then uses them in his startup. This is seen as adding prestige to the institution, unlike in some other universities, where there’s a bit more disdain for commercialization. The co-op program at the University of Waterloo also means that students get real-world experience and bring that back to the classroom, and is another reason for the more positive attitude to collaboration with industry.
The University of Waterloo’s intellectual property policy is even more respectful and individualistic than the one at Stanford, which is also a university known for its spinoffs.
Oxford has more name recognition in North America than Cambridge. Within the UK, they are seen as mostly equivalent, to the point that “Oxford and/or Cambridge” is often shortened to “Oxbridge”. It is easier to get work in government in the UK with an Oxbridge education.
Also, the people you meet at university are more likely to end up in powerful positions if you go to one of the big name universities. So the alumni network becomes more valuable.
It depends on what you want to study and what you want to do afterward. There are some fields where it wouldn’t matter much.
Graduate education is a different matter. With some exceptions, like my friend who went to Harvard for political science that I mentioned above, it doesn’t really matter much what school or department you go to for graduate school. The most important things will be 1) What did you do? and 2) Who did you work with? The rest is almost irrelevant. Finding a good supervisor who you can get along with, and who will help your career, is the priority when choosing graduate school.
I’m most familiar with Canada, and a bit with the US and the UK. I don’t know the situation in other countries.
No, that is also true in the US.
What do you actually want to do with your life? There are careers like politics where personal connection that are gathered during university years are very important.
There are other careers such as starting a startup where personal connections with high status people might not be central and a lot of the YC founders don’t have them.
Why “either or”?
I went to Melbourne University and did an exchange program to UCSD. So I have comparison. I think the distribution of the quality of teaching is sufficiently narrow that it should not play a major factor..
Depending on the job and your part of the world, personal connection might be a very important factor in carer success. It is more likely that you will would gain more, better personal connection in better university.
Wait what? How are you supposed to meet your co-founder / early employees without connections? College is like the ideal place to meet people to start start-ups with.
Meeting a cofounder is useful and college can help with that but I don’t think that you have a huge advantage from being at Oxford compared to being at any other decent university.
Still not sure.
My English sucks, and I should stop thinking in a binary format.
Yes, they do.
There are basically three tiers: the elite (top 10-12 schools), the middle (top 50-100 or so), and the don’t-bother (the rest).
This may be true if you want to go into research or in primarily reputation-based fields like politics and law. In engineering or technology, you’ll be totally fine and get a reasonable job with a degree from other universities. Maybe in the US it’s not worth the fees, but that’s a different matter and does not apply in many countries.
To clarify, what I meant was: Are the famous, top n, or places for education do provide a substantially better outcome for their students on average in comparison to less exceptional ones?
Sure, but the question wasn’t what would get you a reasonable job. The question was whether graduates from top schools have “better prospects” than graduates from no-name schools and yes, they do.
I think the real question is whether they have better prospects given their level of ability and that’s harder to assess.
True, though I think the real question is “better by how much” :-) If, given the ability, the top schools provide no better prospects, then (a) The common advice of “go to the best school which accepts you” is misguided and (2) the top schools have been running a marvelously successful con for decades and even centuries.
The answer to the question “do I get anything valuable from going to a better university?” might of course differ according to what it is you value; e.g., it could turn out that the “best” ones do a better job of preparing you for academic research but are no better for your out-of-academia career prospects, or vice versa.
(As it happens, I agree with you that they probably do have genuine advantages whether you’re looking to maximize learning, future job prospects, useful contacts, or whatever.)
The question was also if the effort is wasted. I agree that the prospects are better at a top school, but that’s not the same as “don’t bother”.
What about the top 13-49?
Is there a list?
It somewhat depends on the specialty, but standard college rankings will get you into the ballpark. Look at things like selectivity (% of applicants offered admission) and the distribution of standardized test scores for students.