Are Ivy League colleges actually better than normal ones or is it just a social status thing?

They are the gatekeepers in many areas of business. I am an engineer but work at a movie studio in the SF Valley and private school alum are all over the place.

Cesar Conde NBC/Universal UPenn Harvard
Ben Sherwood Disney/ABC Harvard Oxford
Paul Lee ABC Oxford
Kevin Tsujihara Warner Bros. USC Stanford
Michael Lynton Sony Pictures Harvard Harvard
Steve Burke NBC/Universal Colgate Harvard

These people shine in anything requiring soft/speaking/people skills - meanwhile the CS grads get turned into IT people.

But he's right, while i know legitimately all around smart people that went to an ivy i have known others that don't even have any common sense, just work ethic and the ability to regurgitate information onto a test.

>So it's not about the quality of the education so much as it's about getting into a club?

Nope, you misread that statement.

The person I was responding to claimed getting a BA in native american gender fluidity or so such bullshit makes you equally worthless in the job market whether you got it from Harvard or your local shit community college. That's simply not true, the Harvard grad will still be much better off. They're just better as human beings in every respect.

Now compare it against a real degree and you start seeing challenges. 4.0 in Business Finance from the night school down the street that doubles as a bowling alley vs 3.0 in Gender Fluidity from Harvard, starts being a much tougher choice.

>They're just better as human beings in every respect.
I can smell the reek of pretentious elitism dripping off of you. A cunt is a cunt, no matter what his alma mater is. Ivy League unis are filled to the brim with diversity and affirmative action hires who have no business being there. It's also filled with entitled social justice warriors and other equally retarded cunts who think that being educated is the same as knowing what you're talking about.

Compare a Chemistry degree from either school. As an undergrad, you're technically learning the same shit. It's when you start your post-grad research work, that the networking kicks into gear. The quality of education is pretty much the same otherwise, give or take availability of equipment for labs etc.

Unless you are there to do hard science, you are just there for the social status.

Harvard and Yale are infested with Dindu SJWs.

I'd just like to point out that Ivy League colleges, by definition, do not give out sporting scholarships.

>As an undergrad, you're technically learning the same shit
That's not necessarily true. Also, the quality is likely to be far better at an Ivy.

No, but they still recruit. As I like to point out, the Ivy League is literally a sports conference. The bottom tier of test scores for the Ivy's is literally, the scores for the athletes. Granted they're smarter than the average joe, and smarter than a whole host of the bumble fucks who get sports scholarships, they are still far below the standard of the rest of the student body.

If you're doing research in undergrad, this is true. If you do research during undergrad you're most likely going to do it during the end of your junior year. You can go to a CC during high school to get gen ed credit then a state school for your freshman and sophomore years then do research at a private uni with more money junior and senior year. Not an uncommon path to take given how expensive private uni is.

Ivies are actually better than normal ones exactly /because/ it is a social status thing.

Ivies are memes, and this is not meant to be derisive in the old Veeky Forums sense. A meme was just elected president. You want to be talked about. We talk about Harvard. There are online quizzes to name all of the Ivies.

When the meme gains steam, it reproduces its own reality. These places really do have good faculty, etc, and part of this is because of the brand.

Lmao, what a cunt m8

Yes and no. I've completed undergraduate and graduate programs at an Ivy, and I can tell you that the resources are amazing. These schools have the resources to hire teachers that know what they're doing and are capable of connecting you to plenty of research and opportunities if you take initiative.

In all other facets, the hype is purely a meme. Here are the primary archetypes of people I've come across:

>foreign people

We have a lot of international students coming from schools in India and China whose grading practices and academic honesty are dubious at best. Some of the students are bright, but many of them come from straight-A+ transcripts in their home districts to a solid 2.7 GPA once they get here.

> suppressed rich kids and their non-rich friends with the same attitude

A lot of the people attending these schools were pressured into it by family and society. They come to campus and experience their first taste of freedom, and they spend the entire time binge-drinking, partying, and devoting themselves to the current liberal platform. A subset of this group includes students on financial aid and in general affirmative action categories who are pulled into this sphere for one reason or another--I personally find this latter case to be the most disappointed due to the raw missed opportunity.

>normal people who stress a little more about school

Many people at these schools are regular people--brighter than average--who work hard while trying to grow up. They study when necessary, are goal driven for the most part, and do anywhere from okay to near-perfect academically.

>neurotic people who have lost track of reality

These are the kinds of kids who believe themselves to be equals with famous mathematicians because they were able to understand theorems during lecture. They generally do as well as everybody else, but they simply have lost the ability to be at all normal in their self-perception.

Good researcher doesn't automatically translate to good educator and often times the knowledge gap between a solid expert and a beginner can leave many implicit assumptions that become hurdles to anyone taking introduction to a class. Usually, a dedicated teacher makes a better job (such as adjuncts) than a researchers due to this simple disconnect between material and expectations.

Lastly, you don't seem to make a distinction between marketable majors and majors for intellectual pursuit. While you clearly come with a jerk-reaction against anything that threatens your snowflake status, the people studying any humanities at these universities generally have strong verbal and critical skills that's usually lacking in your typical STEM student. So no, despite your belief that you are somehow better for studying science, it is actually clear you don't understand humanities from an academic perspective nor the necessary background and analytical skills to actually comprehend it. Your opinion on the matter is as much garbage as you think these areas are.

You have no idea what you're talking do you? Stop being bitter that you didn't make it and accept other people were simply better candidates. Get over it.

>4.0 in Business Finance from the night school down the street that doubles as a bowling alley vs 3.0 in Gender Fluidity from Harvard, starts being a much tougher choice
not true at all
at no time will the harvard grad be competing with the shit state school grad
in many fields pedigree matters
no other school dominates across all areas like harvard
jp morgan does not hire the bowling alley business student - not going to happen
the harvard grad will be the first one in line for the top jobs

Spot the bitter loser everyone. Instead of blaming himself for his failures he lashes out at others. If you want someone to blame look in the mirror - you are the only responsible for your academic shortcomings. Let go of your anger and just accept you are in idiot - you will be much happier in the long run.

I go to UC San Diego because I was rejected by our better schools. Now that I have been here for two years I realize I am just not that smart; even here the top students are just smarter than I am, which just shows me I am nowhere near being Stanford material.

One odd thing I have seen in Rednecks in the military married to Asian hookers produce the smartest kids. San Diego is infested with Inbred Bubba types from the southern/middle states and these guys marry the first women they have sex with which tends to be a hookers in Asia. I know a Redneck from Kentucky married to a Korean whore and they managed to produce two Ivy League kids. These two attended middle class public schools in inland San Diego County and they are far smarter and work harder than people who go to private high schools.

I think that college is what you make of it. To that point, I think that the top students in a selective major (chemistry, physics, math, etc.) at a flagship state school would be competitive at any school. So, I don't doubt that students would be well-prepared for graduate student or industry work or whatever coming out of Generic State U., doing research and taking graduate-level coursework.

The difference is that the at an Ivy League (or comparable school), the average SAT is 1400 or 1500 or whatever, whereas at a state school, the average would be lower (don't know exact figures).

The Generic State U. graduate can get a fine education and do research, but the social status factor does affect getting jobs. I've seen kids in my class (graduated 6 years ago) who got bullshit humanities/liberal arts degrees go on to McKinsey, Bain, Goldman and other prestigious consulting, banking firms. The amount of money they make, well, makes me sick.

I did my undergrad at a prestigious undergrad institution, though not an Ivy (think Stanford/Duke/Northwestern/etc.) Now working on a STEM PhD at Big State U.

People are not equal.
Deal with it.

>bullshit humanities/liberal arts degrees
Why do you call these degrees bullshit? If you want to start with a general office job what is wrong with any of these degrees? Most of the big dogs on Wall St. majored in stuff like that. Boeing was run for many years by a Yale history major with a Harvard MBA.

They are better because they can attract the best of the best in every sense but pretty much the biggest thing is just the prestige.

As a rule it's probably somewhat better, but a lot of the time these little nodes of specialists in certain fields or departments, at the top of their fields, can be more famous at state/non-ivy schools

I think the best thing about very prestigious schools is that they tend to have fuckloads of money and be image-conscious, so they tend to gobble up all the famous dudes, so if you GO there, you can schmooze with big names and get good direction in your field

Everything has to be case-by-case though, too. I've gone to a no-name school that gave me a better educational experience than relatively big-name school, because the latter was just a soulless administrative bureaucracy and none of the professors did what I wanted to do. But then I also went to an Ivy+ whose faculty overlaps with my research focus, and I'm astounded by how good the education can be here compared to the other big name school.

It's all case by case.

>Why do you call these degrees bullshit?

They're bullshit because they're easy and there are no right or wrong answers; and because they don't develop a useful or tangible skill-set.

>If you want to start with a general office job what is wrong with any of these degrees? Most of the big dogs on Wall St. majored in stuff like that. Boeing was run for many years by a Yale history major with a Harvard MBA.

Nothing is wrong with them; if students (or their parents) want to pay four years of tuition for degrees in philosophy or communication or in one of any number of "studies", no one should stop them.

But, this is where the name and prestige of a school matter. Like I said, I've seen people with these majors nab well-paying positions in competitive firms in banking, finance, corporate, etc. I would attribute that to those kids coming from a prestigious, highly-ranked undergraduate institution, as compared to a run-of-the-mill state school.

Solid post. I would say that, at least for many disciplines in science and engineering, there are state schools that easily compete with -- if not surpass -- the Ivies.

>Like I said, I've seen people with these majors nab well-paying positions
No need to tell me this as I wrote this post and know this wellI disagree with your tangible skill-set theory. Most of these people are great writers and can summarize complicated events for the less intelligent reader. Most engineers I know, including myself, are shit writers outside of engineering report which do not require much in the way of critical thinking. We get Ivy interns every summer and most can write a story fit for The Economist or Financial Times at age eighteen.

My friend went to UCLA and is the personal IT bitch to Ben Sherwood at ABC/Disney. He can code like hell, but at a studio he is the coffee maker, fax/copy machine mechanic and Apple repair man for liberal arts majors. I have never met an engineer who could run a tv/movie studio - they simply lack the personal salesmanship of the typical studio chief.

>They're bullshit because they're easy and there are no right or wrong answers; and because they don't develop a useful or tangible skill-set.
It depends on what you call useful, but if you don't believe being a good writer, an eloquent speaker, having a good cultural grounding and being able to read a lot fast, synthesize and summarize that information is useful in real life, you have it backward. These are very broad skills, sure, that don't require you to get an Ivy League humanities degree to acquire, but you can be sure most of the strong graduates from these programs have them.