Does the ranking of your school/university matter?

[Jon_Dahl]

Your honesty is appreciated. However, asking a question and then not caring about the responses people have taken their time to type seems to me quite rude and more importantly, not the best long-term strategy.

I have read most of them. And I care very much about the responses, it's just extremely rare that I read more than two-thirds of the responses of any thread, and that's because I just can't be bothered. I see my slight-to-average laziness as a charmingly boyish imperfection, and not as rudeness by any means.

[Ceaon]

Ah, I may have slightly misinterpreted your post, then. Apologies.
Still, the point made by FinnLassie stands.

[Jay R]

The specific ranking doesn't really matter. Nobody much cares about the difference between #6 and #7, or between #86 and #87. But the reputation of the university in the field where you are looking for a job matters a great deal.

I once accidentally discovered that the Vice President four or five levels above me knew of me as "the Rice grad in Systems Engineering".

Having said that, the reputation of the school can certainly help get you a job - or at least an interview. But only your own work will get you a promotion.

[Jon_Dahl]

I don't know whether to agree or disagree with Jay R so as not to cherry-pick and thus further aggrieve sister FinnLassie. Very difficult. Can someone advise, please?

[FinnLassie]

I don't know whether to agree or disagree with Jay R so as not to cherry-pick and thus further aggrieve sister FinnLassie. Very difficult. Can someone advise, please?

Dude, you're sounding really passive aggressive here.

[Jay R]

I don't know whether to agree or disagree with Jay R so as not to cherry-pick and thus further aggrieve sister FinnLassie. Very difficult. Can someone advise, please?

Oh, you don't need a school with a high ranking to cherry-pick. Farm workers don't usually have degrees at all.

[Flickerdart]

There's a ranking for everything! Including salary. There's also one I'm trying to find where programs are ranked by how much more a graduate makes than an average person in that field. I've seen it before but it was ages ago.

Edit: I think I found it

[Chen]

I don't know whether to agree or disagree with Jay R so as not to cherry-pick and thus further aggrieve sister FinnLassie. Very difficult. Can someone advise, please?

Well since we can't read your mind to determine if you agree or not with his post, I guess my advice is to stop being a jerk.

[Xyril]

I don't know whether to agree or disagree with Jay R so as not to cherry-pick and thus further aggrieve sister FinnLassie. Very difficult. Can someone advise, please?

You might as well just state your opinion, which could kick off some interesting discussion on whether other folks agree or disagree. This message itself will probably irk someone.

[Xyril]

So even here, if someone can drop out of freaking Harvard because they believe they can do better, they don't really serve as an ideal example for a given person to follow.

Something else to keep in mind, Mark met the entirety of his initial team during his first year at Harvard. I'm not saying he wouldn't have done as well on his own, or by meeting other capable people somewhere else, but I would argue there was substantial value in his attending Harvard, even if there wasn't any in him finishing the CS program.

Even ignoring rankings, I think there are surprisingly few universities where talented CS people end up intermingling with with business-minded/entrepreneurial people. My current school has decent CS and business programs, but for some reason that sort of mixing doesn't seem to happen naturally, and as I understand that--in order to push this into happening more--they've been setting up student tech-business incubator programs modeled after ones they have at MIT and some of the west coast schools.

Second, there are no statutory requirements for "scientist" to have a BS either, even though there's no U.S. constitutional amendment that prohibits it.

There's no amendment that prohibits it, but I would argue that the Commerce Clause (one of the non-amendmenty parts of the Constitution) pretty much prohibits the federal government from doing it.

At the state level, regulation of the more white collar professions tend to be more indirect. Doctors and lawyers, for example, are licensed and regulated by their own professional organizations. The government recognizes them by lending them some authority, but it's the state bar or the state medical board that actually sets criteria for getting a license, and in both cases, earning the relevant degree is a major requirement for the easiest path in, but it's not the only way. California, for example, has a famously terrible Bar Exam passing rate because they make it very easy to qualify to sit for the exam through work-experience, rather than earning a JD at an accredited school.

[Xyril]

So wait, this one post weighs out all of the others to you? Even if they had very good and valid arguments?

As the guy who wrote that one post, I'm probably biased, but I feel like I made a decent post for reasons beyond agreeing with OP. IIRC, among the posts that were made up to and including my own, mine was the only one that drew illustrations from personal experience. Granted, two data points don't make a conclusive data set by any means, but two is still more than zero. Mine was also the only post that specified some often-cited rankings, went into specifics as to some of the metrics that go into those rankings, and gave concrete examples of how differences in those metrics can translate into differences in your educational experience.

Also, a large chunk of the posts before mine were about athletics rankings. Athletics usually factor in to a school's general ranking, but the athletics rankings don't match the general "prestige" rankings that OP was asking about. I'm not complaining--I enjoyed reading the discussion and learned a few things--but you really shouldn't be too bothered that OP didn't take the time to respond to or praise posts that weren't responsive to his original question.

Yeah. Cherry picking is something I hate.
I just feel like I'm seeing a pattern.

Speaking of cherry-picking, I should point out that you're doing the same thing. You point out my post as an example of how OP only responds to/praises posts that confirm his preconceptions, and yet right there on the first page, you see a great post by Aedilred that OP not only responds to, but praises as a good post despite noting that he disagrees.

Thank you, quality comments. I find your points very good although I tend to disagree with some of them.

I am guessing Aedilred didn't feel that his dissenting opinions were ignored or dismissed merely because they didn't confirm Jon Dahl's preconceptions, since they both continued to respond to one another.

[Peelee]

Something else to keep in mind, Mark met the entirety of his initial team during his first year at Harvard. I'm not saying he wouldn't have done as well on his own, or by meeting other capable people somewhere else, but I would argue there was substantial value in his attending Harvard, even if there wasn't any in him finishing the CS program.

Oh, I'll never say that there's no value in attending Harvard, even if just for the networking aspects alone. But if someone is attending Harvard and chooses to drop out to pursue business interests, that person is either already wealthy enough or smart enough to very likely succeed with those business interests. It's still not a good model for John Smith over at the University of Iowa.

[Red Fel]

Jumping in late:

I'd say that the ranking matters less than the school itself (more specifically, the program) and its reputation - ranking is simply a reflection of reputation, after all. Almost any school ranking you might find - there's no truly "official" one - is pretty heavily subjective and influenced by reputation of schools, programs, and faculty. Some schools, for example, are low- or un-ranked, and yet have a great reputation within a region; others are high-ranked nationally, but suffer known problems academically.

A common illustration of this occurs in law schools. Most states or regions have their "regional school," a school that's well-respected in that general vicinity, but is either low- or un-ranked nationally. Many also have "national schools," again well-respected around the country. But many "national schools" are frequently criticized. For example, again among law schools, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are preeminently respected; their graduates get positions in the best firms and the highest courts. However, it's also understood that students frequently graduate from a school like Harvard with little or no practical skill; local firms, as opposed to big national ones, may actually prioritize hiring from "regional schools" simply because those students have a reputation for practical skill.

Taking it a step further, with very few exceptions (e.g. Harvard, MIT), once you've been in a professional environment for several years, your school becomes almost irrelevant. Once you're a professional, people care more about your professional experience and achievements than where you spent four years drinking. (Again, unless you were drinking at Harvard. Everyone cares if you drank at Harvard.) Once you graduate and start working for a company, or what-have-you, people are more interested in looking at your professional resume than your academic resume. Assuming you can find an opportunity, it is possible to make up for going to a lower-ranked school by demonstrating competence and excellence professionally. The challenge is the first job.

[Ifni]

Taking it a step further, with very few exceptions (e.g. Harvard, MIT), once you've been in a professional environment for several years, your school becomes almost irrelevant. Once you're a professional, people care more about your professional experience and achievements than where you spent four years drinking. (Again, unless you were drinking at Harvard. Everyone cares if you drank at Harvard.)

As a side note: in academia, at least in my field (physics), I don't think anyone even cares if you were drinking at Harvard, once you get through your first post-Harvard position - what matters is what you've done, and to some degree, where you are now. In fact, since rising trajectories are impressive, sometimes the strongest applicants are those who started out at a not-so-great institution: "I did my undergrad degree at Podunk University, won a full scholarship to my state university for graduate school, and then was hired into the best-in-the-world lab at Harvard" says far more positive things about your intelligence, skills and determination than "I did my undergrad degree at Harvard, went to my state university for graduate school, and now I work at Podunk University".

(That said, part of the reason the first one is so impressive is that it's much easier to get your first post-PhD job at Harvard if you did your graduate training at a top-tier institution - as Red Fel says, it does matter for getting your first job.)

In my field, if I met a professor whose alma mater doesn't have much of a reputation, working at a much more famous place, my usual interpretation would be that the person did something fairly impressive to get hired - it would make me think more highly of them, not less. (Universities' reputations are largely built on their research; to a good approximation, nobody cares about where their faculty did their training.)

If said professor is a lousy teacher, then (again, in my field - may be different in the humanities) I would guess they were hired for doing something impressive research-wise, and they happen to be a bad teacher. It probably doesn't have much to do with where they trained.

Once you graduate and start working for a company, or what-have-you, people are more interested in looking at your professional resume than your academic resume. Assuming you can find an opportunity, it is possible to make up for going to a lower-ranked school by demonstrating competence and excellence professionally. The challenge is the first job.

So yes, this.

[Errata]

There's also one I'm trying to find where programs are ranked by how much more a graduate makes than an average person in that field. I've seen it before but it was ages ago.

Edit: I think I found it

That's a very interesting table. I'm curious about what's up with Yale. -$9.5k is a big outlier. One of the very worst on quite a large list, and by far the biggest name on that end of the list.

[Flickerdart]

That's a very interesting table. I'm curious about what's up with Yale. -$9.5k is a big outlier. One of the very worst on quite a large list, and by far the biggest name on that end of the list.

Yale is on the first page for expected earnings, and second for median earnings. Its alumni hardly do badly - but for their SAT scores, they could be doing a lot better. The article mentions that Yale graduates might be more likely to go into (lower-paying) public service jobs, and has a lot more to say about the methodology.

[Xyril]

(That said, part of the reason the first one is so impressive is that it's much easier to get your first post-PhD job at Harvard if you did your graduate training at a top-tier institution - as Red Fel says, it does matter for getting your first job.)

Preferably a different top-tier institution. Many of these schools make a deliberate effort to hire people who spent most, if not all, of their education somewhere else. It makes sense to do so--unless some PI put a lot of effort into training his PhDs to support specific research and really wants to keep them around, it's generally good to bring in people with diverse perspectives and to avoid institutionalizing certain lines of thinking.

[Xyril]

Yale is on the first page for expected earnings, and second for median earnings. Its alumni hardly do badly - but for their SAT scores, they could be doing a lot better. The article mentions that Yale graduates might be more likely to go into (lower-paying) public service jobs, and has a lot more to say about the methodology.

The article also noted that CalTech did rather poorly, which to me implies a similar phenomenon at work. People who go into academia and aren't adept at moving into an administrative position tend to do poorly compared to those who go into the private sector. This could be an even bigger gap depending on how they measure income--some of the more financially successful professors I know do well because they do a great job earning grants and finding consulting work, which may not be counted.

Also, the study said it only considered the first ten years after receiving an undergraduate degree, but I am not sure whether those lean years spent in graduate or professional school are permitted to drag the averages down. Even if the generally lower income concurrent with education (residency, fellowships, etc.) is ignored, the ten year limit means that when we examine someone finishing a doctorate or an MD, we're only looking at their first couple years of "real" employment, and many people will accept first jobs with lower earnings if they believe those jobs provide professional experience that will pay off later.

Organizations like Teach for America recruit heavily from the top schools--their pitch is basically "Make nearly nothing for a few years, feel good doing something good for a while, and put it on your resume for when you make a run for the Presidency or whatever."

[Jon_Dahl]

As the guy who wrote that one post, I'm probably biased, but I feel like I made a decent post for reasons beyond agreeing with OP. IIRC, among the posts that were made up to and including my own, mine was the only one that drew illustrations from personal experience. Granted, two data points don't make a conclusive data set by any means, but two is still more than zero. Mine was also the only post that specified some often-cited rankings, went into specifics as to some of the metrics that go into those rankings, and gave concrete examples of how differences in those metrics can translate into differences in your educational experience.

Also, a large chunk of the posts before mine were about athletics rankings. Athletics usually factor in to a school's general ranking, but the athletics rankings don't match the general "prestige" rankings that OP was asking about. I'm not complaining--I enjoyed reading the discussion and learned a few things--but you really shouldn't be too bothered that OP didn't take the time to respond to or praise posts that weren't responsive to his original question.



Speaking of cherry-picking, I should point out that you're doing the same thing. You point out my post as an example of how OP only responds to/praises posts that confirm his preconceptions, and yet right there on the first page, you see a great post by Aedilred that OP not only responds to, but praises as a good post despite noting that he disagrees.



I am guessing Aedilred didn't feel that his dissenting opinions were ignored or dismissed merely because they didn't confirm Jon Dahl's preconceptions, since they both continued to respond to one another.

I would say that you don't read the forum here that often, otherwise you'd know that I'm wrong by default unless otherwise proven. It has already been agreed in this thread that I cherry-pick and I'm a jerk, so any further conversation about this off-topic seems futile. I don't agree or disagree with you in any way. Let's just talk about university rankings, and I will try to keep my mouth shut and observe this interesting conversation, please.

[Red Fel]

Preferably a different top-tier institution. Many of these schools make a deliberate effort to hire people who spent most, if not all, of their education somewhere else. It makes sense to do so--unless some PI put a lot of effort into training his PhDs to support specific research and really wants to keep them around, it's generally good to bring in people with diverse perspectives and to avoid institutionalizing certain lines of thinking.

Actually, this is an interesting point. In my experience - and yes, I did pursue a career in academia, unsuccessfully - most programs would prefer to hire educators who are not their alums, but it's not "to bring in people with diverse perspectives and to avoid institutionalizing certain lines of thinking." In many instances, programs want to institutionalize certain lines of thinking. Those institutional lines of thinking are what they believe allows them to run a successful and recognized program.

Insert yet another dig on Harvard. Moving on.

In my experience, the reason that many programs don't hire their own alums, very simply, is reputational. Programs want to hire the "best and brightest." That means either hiring people who have made significant achievements professionally, or - as is more often the case - those who demonstrate a strong propensity for heavily-cited publication. "Publish or perish" is very much still a thing in academia. When a program hires its own alums, it looks like they can't bring in the best and brightest. It's that unsavory cross between the appearance of nepotism - the idea of hiring your own - and the appearance of a lack of merit - the idea of hiring your own because you can't get anyone better. Frequently, for an alum to get a faculty position, I've found that they either (1) have to work in administration, in which case they may get a courtesy class to teach; (2) have to have such an astonishingly narrow skill set that nobody else can teach it; or (3) have achieved such greatness that they're the sort of individual a program boasts as "one of ours."

Reputation is everything to these programs. When you think MIT, for example, you're automatically thinking of some of the finest science and engineering programs in the country. When you think Harvard, you think Harvard Law, the Supreme Court, and the biggest law firms. That's their reputation, earned or not, and they guard it jealously. Rankings are reputational. Hiring is reputational. The decision as to where to locate the campus is reputational. Everything is reputational.

[Liquor Box]

The answer to whether the question of whether the ranking of your school or university matters, is that it does if it matters to some (even a minority of) potential employers. It seems from this thread that it does matter to potential employers to some extent at least.

My own experience (and I am not from USA, so my experience probably is vastly difference from some others) is that it is the Universities reputation (not ranking) that matters, and especially so in some professions such as competitive professions with a partcular required qualification like law, medicine or engineering.

I do know though, that the better Universities in my home country take the rankings seriously and seek to improve their ranking.

Whether or not it should matter to those potential employers, or is an accurate indicator of the student's ability is another matter. It probably is.

[Ifni]

Actually, this is an interesting point. In my experience - and yes, I did pursue a career in academia, unsuccessfully - most programs would prefer to hire educators who are not their alums, but it's not "to bring in people with diverse perspectives and to avoid institutionalizing certain lines of thinking." In many instances, programs want to institutionalize certain lines of thinking. Those institutional lines of thinking are what they believe allows them to run a successful and recognized program.

Insert yet another dig on Harvard. Moving on.

In my experience, the reason that many programs don't hire their own alums, very simply, is reputational. Programs want to hire the "best and brightest." That means either hiring people who have made significant achievements professionally, or - as is more often the case - those who demonstrate a strong propensity for heavily-cited publication. "Publish or perish" is very much still a thing in academia. When a program hires its own alums, it looks like they can't bring in the best and brightest. It's that unsavory cross between the appearance of nepotism - the idea of hiring your own - and the appearance of a lack of merit - the idea of hiring your own because you can't get anyone better. Frequently, for an alum to get a faculty position, I've found that they either (1) have to work in administration, in which case they may get a courtesy class to teach; (2) have to have such an astonishingly narrow skill set that nobody else can teach it; or (3) have achieved such greatness that they're the sort of individual a program boasts as "one of ours."

Amusingly, Harvard is one of the few places I know of that really doesn't care about the "nepotism" thing (again, modulo my field), and thus has a reputation for hiring its own grad-school alumni - they send them away for postdoc training, but then hire them back as faculty. I've attended a Harvard graduation, where all the faculty dress up in their academic regalia (robe color indicates your PhD institution), and the fraction of crimson robes was extremely high. The mostly-but-not-entirely-tongue-in-cheek reasoning I've heard (from Harvardians) is "well, obviously the best people in the field are going to be the same people we admitted as students".

Having lived in a country where most universities worked very hard to hang on to their best alumni, and now in the US where (as you say) people are mostly encouraged to move between institutions, I do feel that the latter system is beneficial for the research community as a whole. It means most people have contacts at several places by the time they're a decade or so into their career, which helps build networks for collaboration and communication.

[Xyril]

Actually, this is an interesting point. In my experience - and yes, I did pursue a career in academia, unsuccessfully - most programs would prefer to hire educators who are not their alums, but it's not "to bring in people with diverse perspectives and to avoid institutionalizing certain lines of thinking." In many instances, programs want to institutionalize certain lines of thinking. Those institutional lines of thinking are what they believe allows them to run a successful and recognized program.

I'm curious if you could elaborate on this. Certainly, universities probably believe that they're doing well because they're doing something right, and they want to keep doing things right, and you can consider that a desire to institutionalize some lines of thinking. However, I don't see how, for example, a top research institution such as MIT would fail to realize that having professors who were all MIT graduates who were taught by the same professors who were all MIT graduates might stifle the sort of innovation that--theoretically--makes them a top institution to begin with.

Insert yet another dig on Harvard. Moving on.

In my experience, the reason that many programs don't hire their own alums, very simply, is reputational. Programs want to hire the "best and brightest." That means either hiring people who have made significant achievements professionally, or - as is more often the case - those who demonstrate a strong propensity for heavily-cited publication.

But isn't this predicated on the assumption that none of their own alums would be among the "best and brightest"? That doesn't seem like a sound assumption. It seems likely that the most capable and the most hardworking engineering students want to go to MIT, and assuming that the school doesn't make them all decidedly lazier and less talented, one would assume that they would eventually comprise a disproportionate number of those "best and brightest" from among whom a reputation-conscious school would want to hire. In my experience, these graduates are instead underrepresented.

[Red Fel]

I'm curious if you could elaborate on this. Certainly, universities probably believe that they're doing well because they're doing something right, and they want to keep doing things right, and you can consider that a desire to institutionalize some lines of thinking. However, I don't see how, for example, a top research institution such as MIT would fail to realize that having professors who were all MIT graduates who were taught by the same professors who were all MIT graduates might stifle the sort of innovation that--theoretically--makes them a top institution to begin with.

Simply put, a given university isn't interested in innovation as an explicit goal. If it occurs, it's a happy accident, an incidental side effect.

The university wants teachers who teach a certain way - the university's way. They want teachers who publish prolifically. If their publications are innovative, that's great. But when it comes to the classes they teach, and the way in which they teach them, the university wants it done the way that's proven to work - that is, the way for which they have a reputation.

It's why, for example, so many law schools use the Socratic method - that is, asking the students to read the cases, and then asking them to interpret the cases, before actually teaching them the cases. That's a method that is generally accepted to work. Schools that have a reputation for classes where professors are particularly cruel may wish to cultivate that reputation, and encourage that behavior among the teachers, if they think it will benefit them.

They don't want professors who will say, "Hey, what if we did this differently?" They want teachers who will keep their heads down, follow the rules, and publish lots and lots of articles to improve the school's academic standing.

But isn't this predicated on the assumption that none of their own alums would be among the "best and brightest"? That doesn't seem like a sound assumption. It seems likely that the most capable and the most hardworking engineering students want to go to MIT, and assuming that the school doesn't make them all decidedly lazier and less talented, one would assume that they would eventually comprise a disproportionate number of those "best and brightest" from among whom a reputation-conscious school would want to hire. In my experience, these graduates are instead underrepresented.

See Ifni's Harvard example. If your school is recognized as one of the best in the country/world, then yes, hiring your own isn't so outlandish an idea.

But most schools aren't Harvard or MIT. Even if they have confidence in their students, they know that their reputation isn't the best. I'm not talking Podunk University, here - even a good school is reluctant to hire its own. They want to hire people with pristine resumes, the kind that vastly outshine their own students. If a school has a choice between two equally-qualified candidates, one an alum and one not, they'll choose the not, for the reasons I gave above.

The fact is, in many instances, when you hear of schools hiring their own alums, it presents an image that, "Oh, I guess some of their graduates can't get real jobs, so the school takes pity on them." Schools are viciously critical of one another, and rankings are as well; a perceived flaw like this, actual or otherwise, will be made out to look bad. And it's a flaw you can't see if they hire a non-alum.

Again, your Harvards and MITs can hire their own, because they claim to be the "best and brightest" anyway. But barring that, everyone else is left picking at the scraps. I was in an academic program that was thrilled to have a Harvard graduate in a teaching position. This shocked me, because this program was heavily focused on practical skills, not academic information, and Harvard is more known for the latter than the former. Additionally, this program was regional, focusing on practice within the state, and this program was not in Massachusetts. But the program was hiring this guy for the reputation, the prestige that he brought. That's despite the fact that this program has many accomplished graduates in its practice area, with both communication skill and practical knowledge and experience, quite a few of whom apply for positions there. The program, which prides itself on practical skills, would rather bring in a Harvard academic for his resume than local experts for their practical skill, knowledge, and appreciation for the program's mission statement.

That's the point. It's about appearances.

[Jay R]

The school can get you an interview. Maybe even a job.

But promotions, or even continued employment, will come primarily from your efforts. (Of course, if your education really is superior, that will help you to be capable of superior performance.)