Are things really this bad? An MIT grad can’t find work? http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/an-ex-bankers-unusual-job-pitch/
this isn’t the weirdest thing i’ve seen a MIT grad do.
That’s nothing. I have a friend with 10 years of work experience who graduated from a top 20 university, got a masters in engineering from MIT, an MBA from Wharton, and most recently worked as a senior analyst at one of the largest and most well known hedge funds in the world. He has been unemployed since the beginning of this year.
yes, things are bad. Did you not see the payroll numbers??? Un rate now @ 5.5%
There was a time that brand name schools (tech schools, elite liberal arts colleges, ivy leagues, etc.) impressed me simply by their names (when I was a naive teenager). Now, after having interacted and worked with people from those places on a daily basis, I’m not too impressed at all. Looks like the people in charge, and the market itself, sees this point in a similar way…meaning that MIT, Wharton, blah blah blah on their diplomas doesn’t mean crap. A person with a 130 IQ with 1-3 brand name degrees is still a person with a 130 IQ…meaning that they still aren’t as smart as a 150 IQ with a state school background. Hopefully in the next few years, the standards are: 1. international 2. standardized 3. not dependent on the fact that your parents were wealthy enough to put you into standardized test prep classes and/or have connections to get you into brand name institutions 4. more indicative of how smart and hardworking you are…and therefore actually mean something I had a friend who had a Chinese girl (from China) working next to him. She was very quiet and unassuming…and he was very surprised that she just finished Level 3 CFA. I said to him: “Make sure you consult her opinion and pay attention to what she says, I’m willing to bet she knows more (and if not, smarter than) your boss, or his boss as well…even if they have their MBAs and/or graduated from brand name institutions.”
I would agree with MIT and Wharton being a crapshoot, but it’s been my general experience that Harvard undergrads tend to actually be very bright and contributory in the workplace (disclaimer: I graduated from a school that is ranked very far below any of these schools). Most Princeton grads too, but Harvard tends to produce pretty top quality people, even for Wall Street.
I work with someone that went to Harvard. What I do doesn’t require a brain (maybe I shouldn’t say that) or a college education. I know the guys brilliant. I don’t want to get into why I know that. I just don’t know why he’s doing the line of work I’m in. Forget about the MIT mba. This guy has experience and can’t find a job. That really sucks. Plus he’s middle age, I guess it’s harder for him.
Sure the market is bad and of course a story like this will get attention. Do we even know the whole story? Then there are people like an acquaintance of mine who barely finished his associates degree and has held solid 6-figure IT jobs for 10 years.
Maybe a decent assessment would be to say that the very smart people at lower ranked schools are just as smart as any person from a brand name school… …with the extra point that there are a lot more of the smarter types of people at the higher-ranked schools…and a lot more dumber people at the lower ranked schools. I just think of it as two gaussians (with ability, intelligence, talent, potential, or whatever on the x-axis) with the following criteria: 1. the means are not as different as the general public believes 2. there is significant overlap… even if the means were much much more separated, the standard deviation is so great the it is difficult to make any inferences or predictions about a member of each population
Maybe, but we can assume that the brilliant people at low end schools couldn’t get into the high ranked schools.
Or most likely, they didn’t care at the right time (or at all) in order to jump through the necessary hoops… You meet plenty of these types of people at state schools who can be brilliant, much more brilliant than the low (IQ-based, not soft skills types of things) requirements needed to simply qualify to get into a brand named school. I know people who got 400 points HIGHER (back in the old 1600 system) on the SAT than idiots who ended up going to elite schools…simply because those idiots did things like lead 10 school clubs, play sports, etc.
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I went to a state school but I would completely disagree with bostonkev.
Maybe because you haven’t met people in physics and math at those state schools…otherwise, I can see where you are coming from…there are a lot of idiots there.
I knew plenty of people at my state school whose intellectual horsepower would embarrass most Ivy Leaguers (mine, on the other hand…not so much). I concur with bostonkev in that most of those students 1.) didn’t care at the right time or 2.) still don’t care. The overwhelming majority of people have no desire whatsoever to work in finance or to work on Wall Street. The question becomes, why spend $200,000 to get an engineering education inferior to the one that costs less than $50,000?
I can also point to a lot of immigrants from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico who have no education whatsoever and are rich and famous athletes now. The point is that there is a reason why Ivy Leagues attract the best and brightest students in the country. You can always point to exceptions here and there but in general the students that go to those schools are at the top tiers of intellectual capability. It is not a matter of “oh I didn’t care about getting into Harvard so I went to the University of Southern Idaho instead.” If you are going to use that argument you better be willing to accept the reverse argument that any Ivy Leaguer who isn’t rich and successful just chooses not to be. I completely disagree with anyone who thinks that the average state school student is as intelligent and has as promising a future as the average student at Harvard. You can say the best student at your state school can outwit the dumbest student at Harvard any day, well that may be true, but I guarantee you if Harvard wanted to put together a team of students to take on a team of state school students in most intellectual competitions I know who I would put my money on. I am the first to admit that just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful – I went to a state school, have no graduate degrees, no special scholastic honors, and yet I make multiples of what an average Harvard MBA makes – but in general there is a statistically significant correlation between pedigree, intelligence, and success.
kkent Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I knew plenty of people at my state school whose > intellectual horsepower would embarrass most Ivy > Leaguers (mine, on the other hand…not so much). > I concur with bostonkev in that most of those > students 1.) didn’t care at the right time or 2.) > still don’t care. The overwhelming majority of > people have no desire whatsoever to work in > finance or to work on Wall Street. The question > becomes, why spend $200,000 to get an engineering > education inferior to the one that costs less than > $50,000? your point of view on this topic is well-known on this forum, but it is doubtful that you’ll ever really convince someone who attended a top-tier school that their education wasn’t worth it. the best thing that has happened to me in my professional career so far (albeit a relatively short one) was graduating from the college that i attended, because it means my never having to defend my academic decisions to an interviewer and my often being perceived to have a certain baseline level of competence and determination for the professional endeavors i aspire to pursue
Agree with numi. Add to the fact that as a fund of funds manager I will not invest with a hedge fund manager who does not have a strong pedigree, no matter how good their returns are. I know it’s not the most scientific approach to the process but it is much easier to justify to clients investing in someone with a Harvard MBA than someone with a degree from a no-name college. Same reason why investment banks recruit almost all of their incoming analysts from top-tier schools, there is a lot less psychological culpability in hiring someone with a strong pedigree than to risk your own reputation by hiring a diamond in the rough.
farley013 (especially), I don’t think I’m making my point clear. Probably the best example I could think of is to compare the following numbers. N1: Number of people with IQ greater than ~150 (3+ standard deviations) - an arbitrary cutoff as to what constitutes “smart” in that these people can pretty much ace any paper/pencil test presented to them (CFA, SAT, GMAT, GRE, MCAT, etc.) and can get any degree (MBA, PhD, MD, JD, etc.) and have good potential to excel (be CEO, get tenure, become billionaires, etc.). N2: Number of people who graduate from brand name institutions. My point is that N1 > N2. My point and your point are not mutually exclusive.
N1 > N2 simply because there aren’t enough spots.