Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Top-tier colleges? I think they are grossly over rated.

I read this post recently about someone returning to a top-tier engineering school to recruit employees. He was impressed with the high-quality of the students and the competition among companies to hire them.

Sigh.

I’ve been in the workplace for 30 years. I have worked with dozens of excellent engineers. None of those excellent engineers went to top-tier schools. I have also worked with dozens of engineers who were unremarkable. The reason I remembered them was that I learned that they went to top-tier schools. There were exceptions to this, but they were exceptions.

Perhaps I worked in the wrong places at the wrong times. I admit that is a possibility. I also admit that my experience has a sample size of one – me.

Allow me to develop a theory. Top-tier schools are hard to enter. A person needs big grades in high school, big SAT scores, big extra stuff. And a big wallet to stay in – $50,000 a year.

Talking with people who know these things…once in, it is almost impossible to be booted out of a top-tier school. If you are an English professor at Alabama, you don’t flunk the quarterback. If you are an English professor at fill-in-the-blank-with-any-top-tier-school, you don’t flunk the daughter of the Senator.

And then consider these two items:

1. When the students in your classroom are paying $50,000 a year to your employer, well, you don’t kick out such wonderful paying customers.
2. When the students in your classroom are paying $9,000 a year at a state school and there are thousands of students attending community college waiting for the chance to get into your classroom, well, it is pretty easy to push out a few of the lower-scoring kids and let someone else in to try.

I encourage people to attend college in one way or another (online is a pretty good way to do it). There are good and inexpensive colleges. Most of it is about how you apply yourself.