{"id":935,"date":"2011-10-04T01:04:52","date_gmt":"2011-10-04T06:04:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=935"},"modified":"2011-09-29T09:21:12","modified_gmt":"2011-09-29T14:21:12","slug":"the-myth-of-the-top-tier-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2011\/10\/the-myth-of-the-top-tier-college\/","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of the Top-Tier College"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n

Top-tier colleges? I think they are grossly over rated<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

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

Sigh.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And then consider these two items:<\/p>\n

    \n
  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.<\/li>\n
  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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,38],"tags":[142,160],"class_list":["post-935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-learning","category-life","tag-learning","tag-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=935"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":936,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions\/936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}