Love this post. My husband and I illustrate this point well. I went to a nationally ranked, well-known university and my husband attended a small, private school that no one has ever heard of. I had almost no contact with my professors and had a largely anonymous education. I was a good student and although the courses were rigorous, they did not demand too much of me and I found no need to visit my professors in office hours or seek out additional resources. And as you noted, although I was a good student, I never stood out among the masses of good students. (Indeed, when it was time to get those letters of rec, I hardly knew who to ask, nobody really knew me!)

My husband however is still in touch with some of his professors from college. He had amazing opportunities and experiences as an undergraduate (such as working on a 6 week research cruise in the Antarctic!). He definitely stood out among his peers and has gone on to his own career in academia.

I wholeheartedly agree with you that the current trend of simply trying to get into the highest school (as ranked by US News, most likely) is not the best idea, either in terms of economics or education. Thank you so much!

Since graduating from college (a highly selective one) I've only worked for companies that ONLY recruit at the most selective campuses. I've also been part of the recruiting process at these companies, and I've seen bosses turn down highly qualified graduates because they "only" went to Princeton (As opposed to Harvard, MIT, Amherst, Standford, and Swarthmore, which are the holy grails). If you work in industries where the higher-ups have advanced degrees and are very proud of their schools, it's tough to get them to even look at a resume from a state school (and the kids probably don't even know about the jobs in first place as the companies don't recruit them). Perhaps sad, but true.

Also a couple other points- most of my high school friends went to schools like Fitchburg. A lot of them (though certainly not all) did not seem to place the same value on their education as their counterparts at more selective schools- it was more of task to get through just to get that degree as opposed to an all-encompassing opportunity to learn. Obviously, you could argue in favor of either of these views, but the point is, it seems like it can be a very different educational experience. I had friends that were serious students at a local state commuter college who complained that it was "13th grade"- they were in classes with everyone they went to high school with, and many of the classmates were disruptive in class, etc. Obviously there aren't enough people who go to both highly selective private schools and state schools to come up with a sample to find out the truth behind these differences.

I also think a major point when it comes to cost is that private schools have more money to give away. Most of them are need blind and will get kids financial aid and you could actually wind up paying less.

There has probably been a difference in my annual salary because I chose a state school over Harvard. But my personal quality of life is much higher.

I was a driven, focused, competitive high school senior with straight A's, sky-high SAT scores, and the mile-long list of extracurriculars. I was also stressed doing what was expected of me. I didn't know who I was, what I liked, or what I was good at beyond the realms of math and science. I know I would have stayed exactly the same if I had gone to the "elite" school. But, due to finances, I went to a state school.

I started out studying Chemistry. And after 3 years, realized that it wasn't for me, switched to Theater Directing and dallied another 4 years in college finishing my degree.

At my "lesser" school, I had freedom to explore without feeling tied up in the financial input/output craziness. Because my parents weren't footing the bill, and because I didn't have to maintain scholarship minimums, I was able to try new things, and one of my most important lessons: how to fail and get back up again.

The world didn't end when I wasn't perfect at something. I realized that life was about way more than fitting society's definition of successful. Thank god I learned that lesson in my early 20's.

Here's a poem written by one of my daughter's classmates (high school junior) in their "gifted" program. It is his cry of frustration and fatigue. The atmosphere there is highly competitive, and it is the same scenario that Tracy mentioned above. Why must we put these kids through this much stress? They are motivated to learn. Why must we punish them by stripping away that motivation?

In the early dim dawn hours of the day
shambling students; the waking dead rise.
To drive past misty meadows; blood shot eyes.
Into a public prison, hours thrown away.

Rows and rows of desks, one mass, part and whole.
Tombstones, grave markers, knowing their place.
Emotionless, cold as stone, down the roll.
Names. Titles. Words without a human face.

Class begins, rote memorization starts.
Fog follows, laying low, outside the school.
Mirrored in the students' own minds and hearts.
Instructor, not a person. Merely a tool.

Hopes crushed, dreams deferred, raisins in the sun.
A withered plant once green and beautiful.
Standardized tests and regulation plentiful
Slowly kill true learning, a man on the run.

Can intelligence survive education?

Written by A.B.

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I assume that certain firms in certain fields recruit only from the most competitive undergraduate programs. However, a candidate's graduate program is probably more important than undergraduate program, even in the world of business.

Some super-competitive graduate and professional schools probably draw mostly from the most competitive undergraduate programs, but it seems that places like Harvard Medical make a point of recruiting people from across the country. The Harvard Medical website has profiles of 7 students. Of those students with their undergraduate program listed, their degrees were from Harvard, Haverford, UCLA, and Oxford. The colleges of the other 3 are not named (and the guy from Oxford went there for a second undergrad degree: his first college is not listed). All the other medical students at Harvard could be from Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, but, then again, maybe not. I imagine a few are from UC Berkeley and University of Michigan and University of North Carolina and the University of Texas.

While getting into the most competitive school is definitely a high, I agree that it is foolhardy to choose based solely on ranking or reputation. With tuitions outpacing inflation for decades, it makes sense at least to weigh reputation vs. cost. Let's say, for example, that a superior student from Wisconsin was accepted to Stanford and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Tuition at Stanford for 2008-2009 is $38,030 per year. In-state Tuition at Wisconsin is $7,568 per year. Yes, Stanford is a top-tier, highly competitive university. Wisconsin is very competitive. Is Stanford worth the five-fold higher tuition? For some students, the answer would be "no."

I also think it is important to consider the economic value of the degree. If you are majoring in Fine Arts or History, and you have no intention of pursuing an advanced degree, I can't imagine how amassing $152,000 of debt at Stanford would make any sense. Indeed, I am not even sure the $30K from Wisconsin is justified.

And speaking of money, it is important to realize that choices you make during and after college can have a much greater impact on income than choice of college. Let's take two top high school students from the Midwest, Ann and Mary. Ann matriculates at the best public university in her state and lives with her parents. Mary chooses Princeton. Both Mary and Ann major in cell biology. Mary works during the summer and ends up with $20,000 of debt. Ann also works during the summer, and ends up with $188,000 of debt. Mary receives a partial scholarship to the state university's medical school and attends that school. Ann attends Harvard Medical. After 4 years, Mary has a total debt of $120,000. Ann has a debt of $439,600. Ann is now $319,600 more in debt than Mary, even though they are now both MDs. But here is where it gets interesting.

Let's say Mary decides to pursue a residency in ophthalmology. Because she attended a second-tier medical school, she matches at a less desirable residency in a community hospital in her state's inner city. After 4 years, her debt, with interest, has increased to $146,000. She accepts a position as an attending ophthalmologist at a hospital in the suburbs of the city with a yearly salary of $150,000. She refinances her loans at 5.75% and ends up with a monthly payment of $852 per month. Her take-home monthly pay (i.e. after taxes) is $9045 - $852 = $8193. If she spends a third of her pay on housing, that amounts to $2703 per month. That amount would allow her to comfortably afford a $450,000 house, which, in the suburbs where she lives, would buy her a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 2600 square foot home.

Ann, on the other hand, responding to all the lectures in medical school about the need for primary care physicians, enters the Family Practice residency at Harvard. After completing her residency, Ann decides to stay in the Boston area. She gets a job with a local family practice clinic making $125,000. By this point, her loans, with interest, now amount to $510,000. She refinances at 5.75% and ends up with payments of $2976 per month. Her take-home pay is $7600-$2975 = $4625 per month. If she spends a third of her income on housing, that would be $1526 per month. This would get her a 2-bedroom, 1-bath apartment in Somerville, MA.

Who here is better off here, State U. girl or Ivy League girl?

I got Mary and Ann confused at the end of my last post. The point is the same, though.

I went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad. I was in an honors program in math there, but quickly burned out. I left with barely enough credits for a BA in math, and thought I didn't enjoy math any longer.

Over a decade later, when I decided to get a masters degree, I chose Eastern Michigan University. I thought I preferred a computer science masters, but they didn't have a program in that. I reluctantly got back into math, and very quickly my love of it was rekindled. I am so much prouder of my degree from that no-prestige university than of my U of M degree. I also feel like I learned more in the easier classes. Much of what you described, Peter, rang true for me.

I try to tell my students (at a community college) something like this all the time. I'll print this article for backup. ;>

Great article, Mr. Gray!

I attended a rural high school, and almost everybody there aspired to go to one of the state universities or to a smaller college not far away. Although many of the students were very smart and could have gotten into Ivy League or other prestigious schools, nobody ever applied. It just wasn't part of the student culture. And that's exactly the way that I was for most of my high-school career. However, everything changed at the end of my senior year. Each year, my state selected 10 high-school seniors (one from each Congressional district) as the top 10 students in the state. This was based mainly on SAT scores. My senior year, I was fortunate enough to be one of them. (I purposely haven't given my real name or my state so that this won't sound like I'm just bragging.) Anyway, before being selected, I was content to go to a state school. However, after hanging around the 9 other students who were selected for a few days, I got "prestig-itis." :) The majority of these students were from urban areas, and most of them planned to go to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech, etc. Before then, as I said, I had been happy to attend a "lowly" state university. But suddenly my perspective changed. I became totally depressed at the thought of attending a state school, and regretted the fact that I had never applied to an Ivy League school. How could I have been so stupid?

Anyway, I decided to apply to an Ivy League school in the fall, and then possibly transfer in the middle of my freshman year. So, even though I was still going to attend a state university that fall, I was a little less depressed knowing that I might end up transferring after one semester. Well, I did get accepted to the Ivy League school that I applied to and was all set to transfer, but there was one small problem: my father. He had no sympathy for my plight. He refused to pay the extra cost for an Ivy League school when he was getting away with paying very little because of my scholarship at the state school. Not only that, if I had decided to just break away on my own and get a loan to attend the Ivy League school, I think he basically would have disowned me. IOW, I probably wouldn't have been welcome back home again. So, I decided to see if there was some way that I could get a scholarship to attend the Ivy League school. This process went on my entire freshman year. It turns out that there wasn't really a way to get a scholarship that was non-need-based (or at least there wasn't back in the '80s). Nonetheless, I still somehow held out hope that I would be able to magically get the funds to transfer to the Ivy League school. But eventually reality hit me like a ton of bricks: I would have to stay at my "mundane" state school. I was very depressed a huge chunk of my freshman year, and had no desire at all to go back to the same school my sophomore year. Eventually, though, my older sister talked some sense into me, stating many of the same things that you wrote in your article, Mr. Gray. Apparently, what she said definitely hit the spot and gave me an entirely new perspective. Up till then, I had felt as if the state school just wasn't "good enough" for me. But she told me that, just by being at a place, you can bring it "up to your level." Anyway, she told me a lot of helpful stuff that completely transformed my view of the place. Long story short, I went back my sophomore year, met a lot of new people, and had a really good time. I accepted the school and never did entertain notions of transferring again. I also knew that undergrad was only 4 years, and that I could always choose some place different for graduate school.

It turned out that, at the end of my junior year, I got accepted into a summer internship at the Ivy League school that I had wanted to transfer to. I jumped at the chance to take it, since then I would finally get a chance to see what life at that school would really have been like. Although I did have an enjoyable summer (the college itself was gorgeous), I eventually came to the realization that life was really not any more "magical" there, and that I probably would have just paid a lot more but not really ended up any happier in the long run.

In a nutshell, I ended up coming full circle. During high school, I was initially happy at the prospect of attending a "normal" state school, but then hanging around my peers from other parts of the state made me completely turn my nose up at the thought. Then after a long, arduous process (lasting about a year and a half), which left me very depressed, I finally woke up to the realization that state schools are really not any "less good" than the Ivy League schools--that it's really more about what you do as an individual than what school you attend. However, if I had read an article like yours when I was a senior in high school, I might never have had to go through all the pain that I did. But, oh well--I guess the pain makes you stronger. ;)

Anyway, thanks for your incredibly insightful article, Mr. Gray. More parents and students need to read articles like yours so that they don't get sucked into "prestig-itis" the way that I did. Looking back, I don't regret not attending a more "prestigious" school for my undergrad; in fact, I was probably better off, because I got to see my family a lot more often, didn't have to study as hard (most likely), and saved a ton of money. The key to lasting happiness is not having what you want--it's wanting what you have.

Alex--and Sue, above--thank you for sharing your experiences. Real case histories, such as yours, are very helpful to people who are trying to make choices.