The Elite College Myth
Panicky parents often think their children’s success in life depends on going to a prestigious school. In reality, there are many paths to achieving great things.
WHEN I WAS GOING through my college search in the early 1990s, I applied to four schools, got into all of them and chose Ithaca College in upstate New York. It offered the major I wanted, was close to home and gave me a generous financial-aid package. My father was a high-school music teacher; my mother didn’t go to college. College counseling in my high school was minimal, with two counselors for hundreds of students. We didn’t know enough to worry about the fine gradations of prestige common in college searches today.
Hard work and a lot of luck means that I now live in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where talk of ultra- selective colleges dominates swim meets and school gatherings for my teenage kids. This is where the “panicking class” lives: parents who fear that their children won’t be able to replicate their lifestyle without landing a spot at an elite college.
As I’ve traveled around the country recently sharing advice from my 25 years of writing about higher education, I’ve heard this panic everywhere. In Hinsdale, a suburb of Chicago, a father who feared AI was coming for his accounting job called a degree from an elite school an “insurance policy.” In Westchester County, just outside New York City, a mother felt guilty because her middle-school math choices “shut out” her son from top engineering programs. In Northern Virginia, a counselor told me that advising students to look beyond the top 50 colleges was bad advice because “McKinsey won’t hire from second-tier schools.”
What struck me in these conversations is that parents weren’t asking about colleges—they were asking for certainty. To find it, they fixate on outliers: the Harvard graduate who works for Goldman Sachs, the dots in the topright quadrant of earnings charts. But here’s what we rarely discuss: Even for graduates of elite colleges, extraordinary success is still a lottery with very long odds.
Think of it this way. All college graduates enter a career lottery for a chance at landing in the top 1% of earners. Recent research has found that graduates of top-ranked schools like Harvard or Stanford are 60% more likely to hit that jackpot. Essentially, they get two tickets in the lottery while graduates of public flagship universities get one.
But even with that extra ticket, the vast majority of elite-college graduates aren’t winning the lottery either. Attending an Ivy League university does
This essay is adapted from Jeffrey Selingo’s new book, “Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You,” which will be published by Scribner on Sept. 9.
Attending an Ivy is not the guarantee of success that parents seem to think.
open doors, but it’s not the guarantee of extraordinary success that parents seem to think. Nor does attending a different school preclude you from achieving great things.
“The reality is that for most graduates things look pretty similar regardless of where you went to college,” David Deming, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, explained to me. Deming and his research team have produced several headline-grabbing studies on higher education in recent years based on massive amounts of data from federal tax returns. One study matched tax returns with college admissions records (deleting identifying data after the matches were made) and found that children from households in the top 1% of incomes were overrepresented at elite colleges.
But the study also looked at the tax records of the graduates themselves, to see whether degrees from those elite colleges brought success later in life. This question has vexed scholars for decades. One reason it’s difficult to answer is that you can’t send the same teenager to two different schools and then measure both outcomes. As a work-around, Deming and his team compared the earnings of students who were admitted to an Ivy or other selective college off the waitlist with students who were waitlisted but not admitted and went to college elsewhere.
Early in their careers, the graduates of elite colleges outperformed those who went elsewhere in three key ways. They were 60% more likely to have earnings in the top 1%—that extra lottery ticket. They were nearly twice as likely to attend a graduate school ranked in the top 10. And they were three times as likely to work for a prestigious employer, such as a research hospital, a top law or consulting firm, or a national newspaper.
But when it came to earnings, Deming found that the average income of Ivy-plus graduates was pretty much the same as those who went to selective public flagship schools, such as Ohio State, the University of Texas at Austin and UCLA.
“If you go to Ohio State with a mindset that I want a job on Wall Street or to go to Harvard Law School, you can totally do it,” Deming said.
If your neighbors loudly proclaim they’re doing everything they can to get their child into an elite college, you might feel like a bad parent for not doing the same. But it’s important to remember that not all graduates are chasing the same jobs with Wall Street firms, global consultancies or the latest Silicon Valley startup. In reality, most people’s careers unfold close to where they grew up or attended college.
“If you get a degree in finance from Ohio State, you’ll probably get a great job at Nationwide Insurance based in Columbus,” Deming said. “Nationwide is a terrific regional employer, but a finance degree from Harvard will lead you to Goldman Sachs.”
For most of us, the career lottery is a regional game. Colleges’ alumni networks are densest in nearby states and cities, and alumni help new graduates get jobs. They broker introductions, write recommendations and provide quiet support, like making sure that a fellow alum’s résumé lands on the hirer’s desk. Even national firms like Deloitte and KPMG, with offices across the country, tend to fill openings locally, recruiters told me. Some are looking for regional expertise—energy in Houston, consumer banking in Chicago or finance in New York—and look for engineering or business majors at colleges nearby.
Above all, employers want prospective hires who will stay put for a while. “If I go to the West Coast and try to pull those students, a lot of times they aren’t committed to living on the East Coast,” said Marybeth Caulfield, the senior manager of global university recruitment at personal-computing giant Lenovo, based in North Carolina. Most of Lenovo’s recruiting is from schools east of the Mississippi, she told me.
Recruiters for Raymond James Financial spend most of their time at schools in the Southeast because two-thirds of its hires are for the firm’s St. Peters --burg, Fla., headquarters, said Simon Kho, who until recently was vice president and head of earlycareers programs at the firm. “We have to think about this with a business mindset around where will the effort pay off,” said Kho. “We don’t just open the floodgates and hope they show up.”
Pay also comes into play. “Sometimes prestige can hurt you,” Caulfield said. “An MIT graduate is going to be looking for a Boston salary in North Carolina.”
So why does the discussion of student outcomes focus so narrowly on graduates of elite colleges? Aspirational appeal is one factor. Families pursue top-ranked schools because their graduates are more likely to end up in the top 1% of earners, occupy certain leadership positions or receive major career accolades.
But that kind of success depends on much more than where you went to college. I asked Lightcast, a firm that analyzes job market data in real time by using LinkedIn and resumé databases, to compare graduates of schools in different tiers of admissions selectivity—under 20% acceptance rate, between 20% and 40%, and so on. We looked at recent graduates who completed a bachelor’s degree and ended up at Fortune 50 firms, using size as a proxy for the most influential companies in the world. The analysis found that elite colleges are slightly more likely to send alumni to a Fortune 50 company, but not by much. In terms of sheer numbers, very few Fortune 50 employees attended highly selective colleges, because those schools’ enrollment numbers are tiny compared with higher education as a whole. Your future coworkers in any company are roughly four times as likely to have graduated from a college with an acceptance rate above 40% than from a more selective school, according to the Lightcast research. And as those coworkers move through their careers, many will end up in the executive suite. Last year, Nature published a study with the headline, “The most successful and influential Americans come from a surprisingly narrow range of ‘elite’ edu-cational backgrounds.” The study focused on just 34 elite colleges attended by some Fortune 500 CEOs. But an appendix revealed that 378 other colleges also had alumni running Fortune 500 companies. Duke and Brown each had three graduates on the list, but so did Ball State, Louisiana State, San Diego State and many other schools.
The religion scholar James P. Carse wrote that life is made up of two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game has a fixed endpoint, with winners and losers. That’s college admissions. An infinite game goes on and on and has no definite winners. That’s the career that comes after college. In trying to master the finite game of getting into an elite college, we too often lose sight of the infinite game of life.
Take Colleen McAllister, who turned down an offer of admission from Cornell University to attend Ithaca College, drawn by its communications school and a generous financial aid package. When I met her at an alumni event, she told me that she spent a semester at Ithaca’s Los Angeles program, where she interned for a production company. After graduation, she eventually found herself up for a job at Illumination, the animation studio. “I had, at that point, done so many different internships and entrylevel jobs,” she told me. “I was happy to take out the trash, happy to do the coffee run. I was willing to read everything that crossed the desk.”
One of her competitors for the job was, on paper, the “perfect candidate,” an Ivy League graduate. But he showed up late to the interview and hadn’t done the homework. “He was sort of above it all,” McAllister recalled. She got the job. Over time, her reputation as a problem-solver earned her a direct line to the CEO, and eventually the role of creative producer on a Universal Studios theme-park ride based on “The Secret Life of Pets.”
Stories like McAllister’s rarely make the headlines because they don’t fit the tidy narrative that elite colleges monopolize opportunity. But they show that in the career lottery, winning numbers are scattered everywhere. The extra ticket that elite colleges provide might improve your odds, but it doesn’t guarantee a jackpot.
