Why are Americans obsessed with what university they go to instead of what subjects they study?

Because if what you actually care about are things like money and power, normie interests which most americans do (money, at least), then it actually is much better for you to go to higher-tier schools, because it puts you in the same milleu as the children of elites who are themselves groomed for government, industry, and so on. And if you are actually an extrovert, then you will be able to capitalize on this proximity to the elites' children and make social connections which will redound positively to you later in life.

Furthermore, there is both an undeniable brand recognition in better schools, Ivies, say, just as the OP's images suggests, which marries up with their genuinely and measurably good academic programs, to make them desirable institutions to attend. If you apply to Goldman Sachs or whatever meme you choose, and the guy you talk to himself went to Columbia (as did you, and the odds of this type of meeting only get that much higher if you apply for meme high-status jobs), then you automatically have a nepotistic "in" with him, based not in family or friendship, but alma mater. You're "from" the same place, so you know the same sorts of things about the place. In our little hypothetical, this makes the interview go more smoothly.

But of course all of this requires you to care about money and power, and also to have a willingness to play the game. In short, you pretty much have to be a turbo-normie, or even a minor Chad.

Because prestige is big in non-STEM shit when it comes to jobs.
They are also all outstanding in nearly every way regardless so its not like its bad. Only STEM really has its best colleges not correlate perfectly with prestige and typical sought after universities (as examples, RPI and Georgia Tech are two of the absolute best engineering universities and employers love them but I never heard of kids talking a lot about them back in highschool even when they wanted to be an engineer)

For reference here is a good list of some of the best Engineering colleges in terms of RoI

forbes.com/sites/cartercoudriet/2016/07/07/top-stem-colleges-of-2016/#136b5029660c
Forgot list

A very significant amount of kids (possibly the majority) have no idea what they want to study when they apply to college.

cause good school = good education
no matter what you study

Huge advantage of a prestigious school is $$$. To put it in context, the endowment of every Ivy League school:

Harvard ($32.7B -- #1 overall)
Yale ($23.9B -- #3 overall)
Princeton ($20.7B -- #5 overall)
Columbia ($8.2B -- #12 overall)
Penn ($7.7B -- #14 overall)
Cornell ($6.2B -- #21 overall)
Dartmouth ($3.4B -- #29 overall)
Brown ($3B -- #32 overall)

Endowment matters because the University can pay for all sorts of shit (scholarships, professorships, facilities, etc.) that grant money can't. Resources are the most important thing a university can offer to its students, and these resources in turn can facilitate better research.

These posts are right on.

The Ivy League plus a handful of other schools comprise the best way to get access the most prestigious, highest paying, so-called "elite" firms in prominent industries such as consulting and finance (Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, BCG, etc.). In big-name tech firms (Google, Facebook, etc.), the list of schools for recruiting may not be quite as stringent, but pretty much the same rules apply. It's the Ivies plus a few other top schools (Stanford, MIT, Duke, etc.), and Public Ivies (Michigan, Berkeley, UCLA, UT-Austin, etc.).

ITT: Anti-America circle jerk

Enjoy your major in feminist basket weaving

ITT: Justified Anti-American circle jerk

not even from your country you humorless spastic

the list is actually much larger than most people think, like you have to be really stupid to legitimately not have a chance at any of the schools.

Because elite american colleges are more about networking than getting an education.

Because I go to Cornell and you don't

>penn state
>state university
>ivy league
how

Let's face it.
Ivy's are pretty neat for networking and prestige.
But in terms of education the US is really lacking and most likely none of them are near the education level of a regular German state university.

You're basically ensured to get your degree there once you get accepted and show up regularly.

Brown should be kicked out
Columbia should be kicked out
Pennsylvania should be kicked out
Cornell should be kicked out
Dartmouth should be kicked out
Yale should be kicked out
Princeton should be kicked out

That just leaves Harvard, doesn't it?

This. American BSc = High school diploma in Germany.

>being this retarded

>once you get accepted
that is the hard part, here in europe we have a system that accept everyone(pretty comfy though) and it selects the best with exams

Cool opinions. Got any sources to back up those claims?

UPenn, you halfwit.

enlighten me

what. again, enlighten me

>psu.edu/
>upenn.edu/

oh fuck private unis shouldn't use state names what the fuck

i feel like the dumbest human alive

>American BSc = High school diploma in Germany

we do standardized tests too (ACT which is out of 36 and SAT which is out of 1600), its just that the volume and quality of applicants has been so high that just test scores cannot get you into Ivies and the like anymore. They consider everything to split hairs. Basically it includes all of your GPA (grades), Test scores, Extra curricular activities, legacy (basically everyone but MIT), quality of college essay, AP/IBs taken and your test scores /5 on those, and so on.

For Ivies if you don't have at least a 30 on the ACT or a 1400 on the SAT you shouldn't even bother applying, and if you want a serious chance at it then you have to get at least a 32/1450, preferably higher unless you have something great going for you (legacy, female engineer, cured AIDs in Africa, started a business, etc)

It's the same as with the University of Chicago (ivy league) versus the University of Illinois at Chicago (state university). Easy mistake.

UPenn was in existence for at least 100 years before Penn State.

Its a common confusion so don't feel too bad

Don't forget about Oxbridge either. The Cambridge mathematics Tripos are the gold standard for math exams, for example, and "extracurricular" nonsense simply doesn't exist there. A Senior Wrangler in math is formidable.

I am also going to note that in the US "holistic review" is just a buzzword for "we want to be able to arbitrarily accept and deny people because they are a minority, legacy, or their parents donated to the library and we don't want to be held accountable for it"

>32
>1450
That's absolute bullshit, I got a 36 and 1590 with perfect GPA, top of class, all 5's on AP exams except for one and took research positions in government labs and universities and was rejected from every elite school I applied to
t. cis white straight middle class male

This is true. I was a spic with a 35 and elite schools drooled over me. Got a lot of acceptances that I shouldn't have gotten due to grades. God are spics dumb, thank you white guilt and liberal cucks for allowing me to forever attain positions that I am not remotely qualified for.

I have strong doubts this is true. Please show credentials plus rejection letters.

What research position would hire someone without even a plebian bachelors? Liar and a faggot.

I said that if you have a 32/1450 you have to have something else significant going for you, learn to read faggot

They are the highest rated universities in the world for a reason, the delusional eurocucks ITT unironically think their backwater irrelevant schools actually provide them a quality education.
99% of euro PhDs wouldn't survive a semester at the level of an Ivy League school I can promise you that.
The course load alone would rape them. Most Ivy schools have courses in the first semester that are literally designed to weed out the brainlets and weak. The people saying things like 'it is for the connections!' have clearly never set foot in anything that would resemble a quality university.
Ivy league schools are designed to provide the most rigorous education with an environment that produces the BEST professionals that it can. Your state schools are full of professors that barely got their degrees while Ivy League schools are filled with professors that literally write the books in their field and provide ground breaking research.
TL;DR: ya'll niggers delusional underachieving brainlets

I haven't received physical copies of the rejections yet
It was the USGS and UofM, I had connections

I'm too lazy to redact more shit right now

they can't prove you aren't hispanic. re-apply.

Interesting. If you do find the time though, please include the rejection letters, proof of GPA and class rank, and research positions.

But worth noting is that a problem with the Ivies is that it attracts the top brass from all around the country and the world. While scoring 99th percentile is quite impressive in itself, the school has no way of knowing if that makes you a better choice than someone scoring a 1500, or 34 or someone who scored a 1600 or 36 due to the difference potentially resting on multiple choice and in turn some people guessing right or wrong on the questions they don't know the answers to. And there's a lot of people who make those kinds of scores and have more things to offer the college including guaranteed funding through tuition payment, guaranteed funding from the state through pell grants for taking in a low income applicant, sob success stories to tell at graduation to advertise for the college, etc.

If you are low middle class, or true middle class, have nothing but your academics, which all other applicants have on a reasonably similar level, and you're most likely going to be coming in on bank loans and no outside scholarship aid (unless you do, and if you do you better do your damn best to play this angle up) a college may not bother to take the risk with accepting you because you might not get that loan renewed year after year and the cash flow can stop, whereas with a poor student for instance, the pell grant is guaranteed as long as they stay in school, and it's guaranteed for ALL poor applicants by the state.

Though I will say it does strike me as odd that you'd be rejected if you held important research positions. If you included that in your application essay in great detail, it's surprising that they didn't accept you, given that some Ivies are research hubs and could always use another set of qualified hands in the lab.

What was your ACT/SAT on your first try? That picture seems to be the December ACT so its not relevant for ED/EA, what ACT score did you submit? Do you have anything beyond grades and the research? Despite what I said here Ivies and other elites do split hairs and get down in the weeds and do take into account ECs and other shit, if you are a white middle class guy with no legacy, a mediocre/bad essay, and shitty/very few EC's then your chances aren't as amazing as the grades and scores should dictate.
I think your chances should be high thought as your scores and grades are top notch and you did research shit. Remember the entire thing is a crapshoot regardless so nothing is guaranteed.

Also some Ivies (Cornell is what I remember prinarily) take into account all the scores you have ever taken and its not optional. If you had a mediocre (30 or lower) score it might count against you.

It's April, I just had a screenshot already and was too lazy to log in to get the official report
That was my first time taking both tests

>This is true. I was a spic...

Yeah uh, nice try user. Try to be more subtle next time.

What score did you end up going to?

School autocorrect sucks

That's how education should be.

Here in the US, you're pretty much never gonna attend a top school unless you're already wealthy and connected. Europe has it's shit together.

Chicago isn't Ivy, but it's definitely on the same level.

Ivy only refers to eight specific schools in the Northeast. Not even MIT is among them.

The universities benefit far more and actually in a twisted way can produce better research and shit by prioritizing legacy and connected people.

Doing that keeps families in schools, dramatically raising the chances that family will give money to the university and also naturally increasing the power and wealth of that family, which helps the university's prestige and money inflow. There is almost no incentive beyond higher ideals for universities to not run admissions the way they do.

Yeah theres some misunderstanding that Ivies alone are the greatest schools in the US. The truly best schools in the US are Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and I would not say U of chicago is equivalent to these 4 I would say U of chicago is better than the likes of Brown and Colombia. Most of these "lower ivies" are known for their graduate school prestige not their undergrad

I'm afraid you are both highly incorrect about a vast number of things, which is common for people who dont actually go these schools. For PR purposes these schools want to get away from the WASP atmosphere as much as possible, and so the vast majority of their attendees have their "quirk" as either being poor, brown, or both, and smart. I have shared photos that make myself living proof of this although I am white.

It used to be the University set your path in life.

Not anymore. The Ivy League schools and places like Stanford, Cal, etc are not as awe inspiring as they used to be.

Why? Because in the past the truly gifted went to those Universities. If someone came to you with a degree from one of those places you knew this person was smart.

Now in the age of diversity and SJW these former places of higher education have become a joke.

In a strange way thanks to the progressives devaluing the name of these once great Universities the actual person now matters not the school you went to.

The real reason is that a lot of colleges a balance of two things: Money, connections, and opportunity. Schools like Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and MIT have these in spades for their respective focuses (let's be real, Yale and Harvard are more focused on finance, law and humanities than anything else). Other schools require a balance, and as such are not as good for people who are entrepreneurial and want to be in a high place by the time they're 40. Schools like mine (UC Berkeley) have resources and connections, but almost no money (due to public funding). Quality of education really doesn't play that much into it, because undergrad curriculum is relatively standardized and you're basically just trying to get yourself in the same place as people of similar or higher caliber to yourself, since that makes employers and outside entities recognize your relative ability. Think of it as binning for CPUs and GPUs.

If you want to split hairs about elite schools:
Ivy rankings:
Tier 1: Harvard, Yale, Princeton
Tier 2: Columbia, UPenn (For Business/Wharton only), Cornell (For Engineering only)
Tier 3: Cornell (everything else), UPenn (everything else), Dartmouth, Brown

Overall Elites:
Tier 1: Harvard Yale Princeton Stanford MIT
Tier 2: Columbia, Caltech, UChicago, Williams
Tier 3: Cornell, UPenn, Brown, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins
Amherst falls somewhere in 2/3, probably 3
If I'm forgetting anyone significant just say it.
within the tiers the order doesn't mean anything its just the order I remembered them in.

My father who is a legacy at an Ivy is deeply aware of why they do shit in admissions, stfu

I was only referring to legacies, and I didn't imply that legacy automatically gets you in. It can cure the sick but it can't raise the dead unless your parent has the influence to make a phone call. Of course minorities have a much easier time getting in.

Additionally, you are statistically wrong to say the vast majority of attendees are either poor or brown/both+smart. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that its false, and it takes a simple google search to disprove it.

Cal for sure has a lot of people who are there for bullshit reasons (though if there's anything I've learned since coming here it's that it's impossible to judge a person's relative intelligence and giftedness just by their major and outward presentation), but if you look at the STEM and business fields they're still totally top notch. As a matter of fact, almost every 1990 or earlier Cal alum I've talked to has opened with "Man, if I applied today I'd never get into Cal."

I don't know user, the people at those schools are still some pretty smart fellows. It's not like Yale and Harvard are taking bums off the street because they're black. And furthermore, the graduate research departments have benefited greatly from the new business style approach of accepting legacy primarily.

First of all, both of what we are saying is anecdotal, so if you want to tell me what I am saying is shit, you need to throw "my dad works at Nintendo shit" out the window. In retrospect "vast majority" wasnt the best term to use. But heres the truth: just about 50% of undergraduates at Harvard are a minority, counting asians. Harvard and other top schools have some of the largest financial aid programs in the world, and if your family makes less than 80K you basically get in for free. You can get both of these from harvards website. So the point is the majority of people that get into these schools are not "wealthy and well connected." You could count the number of nonwhite historical harvard families on one hand, and the perpetuation of a wealthy elite exclusively through the Ivies is bizarre considering the political climate of the current era.

>both of what we are saying is anecdotal
Both of what we are saying is also clearly false based off your backpedaling
My dad went to an ivy but doesn't work in admissions
>vast majority wasn't the best term to use
Yeah its just flat out incorrect
>50% of undergrades are minorities
Exactly 50% are so thats correct
>If your family makes less than 80k you basically go for free
Most are over 80k but yes
>majority of people who get into these colleges are not wealth or well connected
This is all right but I never implied that. I said and implied that they proritize legacies and the well connected. I did not qualify how much they did, but they do it about as much as they do an individual minority group that isn't Asian (about 16% of Harvard is legacy, about 14% is Black about 14% is hispanic. I exclude Asians because colleges actively discriminate against them which is twisted)

Calling what i said "highly incorrect" is a stretch. Being a legacy helps about as much as being a minority, both raise your acceptance chances from sub-10% to about 30%.

I get what you're saying (and I below wrote a post which can easily be construed to agree with what you wrote here), but your prose suggests the mistakes that everyone actually does value the exact same things, which is of course obviously false. The whole thing goes to what people value. The OP literally questions why "Americans" taken as a group presumably value what they value, and the very question suggests the reality that others (Europeans? Introverts? Muslims? Christians? Nihilists? Hedonists?) don't have the same value system.

Less spicily, broadly, yes, adults have a certain practical "money/employability" expectation of a college education, for all the trouble involved, and culture the young to have similar expectations. But even this isn't exactly the same thing as "muh social connections", though of course the two are related. If that is what one either genuinely values, or is obliged to value.

The other huge thing that you are missing in your post is the social proof-for-employment of credentialling, which I think you know so well that you simply didn't make the point of mentioning it, but it does deserve being mentioned in conneciton with all this. HR people don't want to talk to the elevated-NEET sperg who actually does know economics inside and out because he took two years off to research independently. HR people, or people making hires, just want to tick the nice box that this one has a post-secondary degree of some kind and consequently 1) can actually finish a long-term, high stakes project and 2) isn't a total status-loser. That is what goes on in the head of a hiring person. That said, it makes me happy that the department that everyone focuses on killing dead nowadays is HR. And I say this as a person who recalls no personal suffering or loss at the hands of HR, it's just this stupid idiot culture thing in the way.

expanding very slightly, and making the point, you ignore the simple fact of actually completing a college degree of any kind, and how that does in-and-of-itself automatically raises you in employers' estimation of you, versus your more detailed project of the networking bit, because you would rather contemplate the actions of more self-actualized adults. My point here is that if you want to honestly describe all of this in a broad sense (college, Americans, non-Americans, work, employability, really really broad socioeconomic categories), then you must treat of some different value systems and spheres. Even and especially the "dumber" ones, or the ones that you find boring or don't personally "like".

Possibly long winded, but exactly the answer you're looking for with depth and insight...

newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

TL;DR marketing

In america, universities are businesses first and foremost.

>t. cis white straight middle class male
And this is where you fucked up. My ex got a full ride to yale out of highschool with 1600 sat and 5s. 10 points isn't much of a difference but having a vagina is. My essay to hopkins was about the struggles of being a homosexual in modern society. To this day I'm convinced I got in for pretending to be gay.

>1600 sat and 5s.
5s on what?
Generally speaking, is getting to schools undergrad harder than grad?

Ap exams. In highschool in the US we have accelerated programs that are basically entry level college courses in highschool, at the end of the year you take an exam given by the state with 5 being the highest score. I think graduate programs are easier to get into than undergrad because you have more opportunities to distinguish yourself from your peers but I'm talking entirely out of my ass so what do I know.

Missing Vandy, Georgetown and CMU at tier 3

>Yale
>That shield

Endowment matters as long as it is actually spent on student(')s (activities).
And then $/student would matter more than raw endowment per university - and THEN it would be really important to know which major and under-/grad students would be invested in how much moneyz.
but hey big moneyz = good school, 90% of harvard grads get summa cum in my face laudae, they so gud!

What's actually nice with/in those "elite" universities is the ratio of students/tutor.
In Germany - at least STEM at TUM, LMU, Bonn, and some minor universities in Bavaria I know it for sure - that ratio often ist more than 20/1 in undergrads, sometimes even 30/1.
In Cambridge math tripos it is like 3/1 to 1/1, this is the DREAM for studentes that actually wanna achieve something and not just study with a lot of hate for a degree becasue *big money*.
Lecture in those "prestigiouse" German universities are HUGE, speaking 500-1k and more students in one lecture hall; it is absurdly insane.
The HUmbold idea(l) of university and teaching is garbage in today's time in my opinion, esepcially with kids going to university 17-19 years old and not a clue what they really wanna do in their lifes. The approach of strict attendance and multiple forms of testing (homework, sit in, take hom tests, quizzes) makes sure that everyone who is willing to suffer for his major is really learning something other than for a test and instantly forgetting everything.

damn, I'll finish my CS major (trololol) this year and want to do a maths major (living in Germany, age 25 right now).
Sadly mathematics ain't really big here, and the ETHZ doesn't have the courses I'd be interested in, so I stranded on cambridge.
But esepcially as a 26 years old (since I missed October 15th deadline) in 2018, I think it might be extremly difficult to get accepted into an undergraduate program over there? I've read an ama that some interviewer in Oxford was very reluctant accepting students above the average age of like 17-19 years because "old people are not teachable anymore" and "young and old students don't work well together".
Partially I can understand his points but then, I'd argue that I worked pretty well with those 17 year old kids when I've been 24 years old, so...
Anyway, maybe the tripos diesn't really mean shit since the courses are pretty much the same, the few "bigger" mathe departments in Germany offer (namely LMU, Boon, TU/HM Berlin, Heidelberg and Göttingen).
Failing for the prestige-meme or is it worth a shot?

Mach dir keinen Kopf wegen des Alters. Der Rest ergibt sich eh von selbst mit der Zeit. Viel Erfolg dennoch. Dieses "zu alt zum lernen"/"jung/alt lernen nicht gut miteinander"...-meme ist totaler Schwachsinn.

Notfalls irgendwie quer rein.

Yeah AP exams are meant to be a college course lite version, if you get a 5 (which is legitimately very difficult as a high school student) then it indicates you would be able to pass the same course in college, and colleges recognize that and allow you to use it to skip core requirements, as well as it helping a lot in admissions. Sometimes they also accept 4s. As an example I got 5's on AP European History and AP US History (I took much more APs just examples) so I am pretty much able to just skip most college history requirements at most colleges that require them.

>muh Cambridge

>tfw born in tacoshithole
>tfw my best college is still shit in regards to american colleges
how do I emigrate /sic/?

I'm conservative and have 130IQ even if brown.

What school did you end up going to?

Apply to an American College and get a student visa. You're welcome to learn here, the only problem people have is if you stay here and don't use your knowledge gains to fix your homeland.

you can't solve tacolandia without first making drugs legal.
drug dealers have even more money than what the police guys have and many times is a fucking hydra that you can't kill.

not possible to win that war by keeping drugs illegal.

Honestly, just start studying at whatever is available in your country and then try to work yourself to other universities via connections at some point. Also the differences regarding quality of education are not as big as people make them out to be. Especially for undergrads the differences are mostly irrelevant. It's not hard to switch to another university later on either.

Ja, ich würde/werde es eh als ein "schauen wir mal obs klappt" Versuch ansehen, ansonsten Bonn oder LMU; am Ende kommts mir nur darauf an, dass ich Spaß und Herausforderung hab.

Warum machst du deinen CS master nicht erst einmal?

Sorry, strongly disagree: a university shouldn't be judged by it's floor (i.e., how easily somebody can make it through with a degree). Rather, a university should be judged by its ceiling. A motivated undergraduate capitalizing on all of the opportunities afforded to them will benefit proportionally to the resources available to them (minds, instruments, etc.).

CS hat mich nicht sonderlich vom Hocker gehauen; werd mich für n Data analysis Master an der TUM bewerben, aber je nachdem, ob ich innerhalb dieses Jahres eine Zukunft dort sehe, annehmen oder eben nicht; Mathe hat mich einfach hart vom Hocker gehauen - bin früher leider in der Suppe "Mathe ist schwer, suckt, 4 gewinnt" geschwommen, das war dümmlich meinerseits - aber die Berufsaussichten sind halt scheisse, vorallem in der Forschung in DE und CS ist mein zweites Interesse, also sicher kein Hass Studium gewesen, aber eben nicht das, wonach ich das letzte Jahr lechze

Die ganzen Spezialisierungen sind alle nicht so wichtig, da die HR Tussis sowieso nur Schwänze lutschen können und die alten Männer vom Schlag " zu meiner Zeit gabs noch den guten Diplomingenieur" sind. Ach und ohne Doktor bist du automatisch eine Hierarchiestufe geriger, und das für immer. Mach was in Regelstudienzeit und such dir etwas, was halbwegs spannend ist und gut bezahlt wird.

T. Experde.

These guys are mostly right.

For example take Indian institute of technology. The top 5 IITs require a rank of 1-5000/100,000. They have the best placements and these send the pajeets going to google, Oracle, windows and shit. My friends at IIT say it's absolute shit quality and study wise but that's not why IIT is famous. It's because it has become a brand. A brand sold to companies

Also you create a lot of contacts with hard-working people which can be useful

Because they fell for the meme that somehow paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for the same information you get at any state school for four years means that you're smarter than everyone else.

>shit quality and study wise
>A brand solid to companies

You don't see the discrepancy between these statements immediately? Businesses are fundamentally driven by profits, and incompetent labor will absolutely kill your bottom line. Companies tend to hire from brand name schools because it's an assurance of *quality*.

Look, you want more proof? Go to any academic department website and look at where the professors did their PhD's and where they did their postdocs if applicable. You'll notice that one (if not both) of those two will be affiliated with a big boy program in some capacity -- that's because they can trust the quality of the applicant. You won't see a lot of people doing PhD's at Bob Jones University and postdocs at Old Dominion or whatever shit.

My mistake should've clarified that it was only undergrad. Postgraduate programs aren't good here at all but these have the solid undergrad brand

>I was a spic
then what happened

>But in terms of education the US is really lacking and most likely none of them are near the education level of a regular German state university.

>The most well known and prestigious universities in the world don't hold up compared to the average German school

This is one of the greatest shitposts I've ever seen. My god.