Frank Bruni gives really bad college advice
Frank Bruni writes an op-ed in the NY Times in which he urges high school students to “ask themselves not which school is the surest route to riches but which will give them the richest experiences to draw from, which will broaden their frames of reference.”
This is really bad advice because what college a person goes to is the single most important key to unlocking a good career track. And because teenagers are flighty, don’t know what they really want, and can’t even imagine what kind of person they will be in ten years, they are likely to choose a college for stupid reasons.
Parents should ignore this bad advice. They should guide their children to attend the most prestigious college they can get into, and to select a major that will allow them to enter a good career track. I don’t even recommend parents take their children on visits to colleges, in order to prevent them from falling in love with a lower-tier school that has a good marketing message.
Lion of the Blogosphere 
The best advice is to take a gap year
Gap year
January 6, 2013 at 6:50 PM
A gap year is a horrible idea if one wants to compete in STEM. Taking a year off while the Asian students plow ahead just put your farther behind. Also, the elite schools do not tolerate gap years and do not take non-traditional students.
superdestroyer
January 7, 2013 at 6:29 AM
In what world do elite schools not tolerate gap years or non-trad students? Are you referring to MIT and Caltech specifically, or elite schools in general?
Ian
January 7, 2013 at 12:41 PM
My advice is that you should not go to an elite (Top Ten by US News) liberal arts college. Instead, one should go to the lower first tier major Universities like Northwestern, Vanderbilt, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, or Cornell. I know that Cornell is technically part of the Ivy League. Although schools like Middlebury, Bowdoin, or Wesleyan may seem prestigous to a select few, I think a young adult would do better by attending a less selective school like Vanderbilt due to wider name recognition.
de Broglie
January 6, 2013 at 7:35 PM
Going to an expensive second-tier school is the worst of all possible worlds. If you gotta pay through the nose, you might as well get the “prestige”.
Tarl
January 8, 2013 at 11:20 AM
Yes and no. That makes sense for Harvard versus Columbia, or Columbia versus NYU, but if you’re not Ivy League material and not good at math/science you may be better off going to a state school and not burdening yourself with loans. Of course, that requires realistic self-appraisal, which as we all know teenagers are great at, or realistic appraisal of one’s offspring, which we all know parents are great at.. 😉
I agree these NYT people are FOS.
Lion of the SFG
January 6, 2013 at 7:39 PM
A more-prestigious college (which, having attended both a very prestigious college and an extraordinarily non-prestigious college, I know not to be the same thing as a better one) will open far more doors, thus providing more options to its graduates. Tell me that the world shouldn’t work that way and I won’t argue. It does, however, work that way.
Iowa Jim
January 6, 2013 at 7:53 PM
Iowa Jim is right. Tier One and Ivy League schools provide far more resources for their students to work with and open a lot more doors in order for their graduates to get the most out of their education and life in general. Less stellar schools have larger classes, lower tier professors and often unresponsive career and mentoring centers. I myself have attended several schools of various degrees of prestigiousness to make the comparision.
Students don’t pay dearly for an elite school education just for nothing.
Just Speculating
January 6, 2013 at 8:53 PM
That kind of talk is just bragging; his advice makes sense for high-status people who are already rich, so talking like that makes him look high-status. It has nothing to do with giving good advice.
aisaac
January 6, 2013 at 9:07 PM
Ah, this new blog’s virginal college-and-career post! Let me be the first to reflexively retort that the Lion’s advice here depends entirely on what you mean by “good”, and that if (like me) the idea of a “prestigious” career in New York City makes you feel icy horror in the pit of your stomach, and if you’re content to make an above-average-but-not-excessive income living in the rural south or mid-west – then the advice given above is not accurate.
Samson J.
January 6, 2013 at 9:46 PM
This is what I would like advice on.. How to make an above average income in the rural areas
Gap year
January 7, 2013 at 3:47 PM
I think it also depends on whether or not college graduation will be the end of your education. If you know you are going to grad school, undergrad becomes less important. As an extreme example, if you are going to get a PhD in science, nobody is going to give a rat’s ass about what college you went to.
steve
January 6, 2013 at 10:19 PM
But where you went to undergraduate affects what graduate program that will admit you. However, you are correct that people should think about the end point.
A better way to look at the subject is that poor people should not try to make the entire leap in one generation. Just like the NY Times story about the minority students from Galverson, Tx made clear, a first generation college student should not be at a US News top 20 school because they will either fail or get a worthless degree with a low GPA.
superdestroyer
January 7, 2013 at 6:33 AM
” Just like the NY Times story about the minority students from Galverson, Tx made clear, a first generation college student should not be at a US News top 20 school because they will either fail or get a worthless degree with a low GPA.”
Well, her children would just regression to the population mean; she herself might have been the only person in her lineage able to ascend by having the mere opportunity to attend a relatively prestigious college (Emory in that story), even if she would be fettered by encumbering debt.
It’s really quite pathetic that she has a 1240/1600 and that’s all she could achieve. Assuming regression to the mean is correct, the prospects for her children would not be so propitious.
Black_Rose
January 7, 2013 at 3:54 PM
Regression to the mean is not understood correctly by most commenters who cite it, and most people around here would understand the world a lot better if they just ignored the concept.
Lion of the Blogosphere
January 7, 2013 at 4:04 PM
Bruni is in thrall to the idea that rank is equal to virtue, that the world is just, and that virtue and vice are innate, cannot be acquired, aren’t a matter of chance.
Nicolai Yezhov
January 6, 2013 at 10:24 PM
Lion, you are right about his terrible advice. But why are you surprised? In other writings he has done he has advocated spending LESS on prisons in NYC and instead using the money now spent on prisons on silly social programs.
Cutting prison space in NYC will result in a dramatic increase in burglaries in NYC. For evidence look at Vancouver please.
When you compare the overall burglary rate of Vancouver to the overall burglary rate in NYC you see that Vancouver has a much higher burglary rate around 2x as high per capita
But when you normalize for the races, the Vancouver rate seems to be at least four times as high as the NYC rate.
Let me explain. It is common knowledge that the majority of burglaries in NYC are committed by blacks and hispanics. Non hispanic whites have a very low burglary rate in NYC.
But Vancouver has essentially no blacks and no hispanics. therefore the burglaries in Vancouver are mostly being done by non hispanic whites. Do the math, if the overall burglary rate in vancouver is 2x that means that whites in vancouver are more than 4x as likely to commit burglaries as whites in nyc.
if anyone else has a different interpretation please let me know.
I think that this is clear evidence that building prisons for burglars makes perfect sense and I support such prison construction.
afd;jksdsakjf
January 6, 2013 at 11:10 PM
“whites in vancouver are more than 4x as likely to commit burglaries as whites in nyc”
Steve Sailer has found that Los Angeles whites are extremely law abiding, much more than whites nationwide. The same could be true of NYC whites.
bob
January 6, 2013 at 11:27 PM
Just Speculating, you disagreed with Iowa Jim. You might want to reread his post.
T
January 6, 2013 at 11:24 PM
Iowa Jim said: A more-prestigious college will open far more doors, thus providing more options to its graduates.Tell me that the world shouldn’t work that way and I won’t argue. It does, however, work that way.
I agree with him on this.
We could go into a philosophical debate as to why minimum wage employees should be just as motivated to work as highly paid CEOs. Or better yet, as to why a poor person should be able to enjoy all the things afforded to a rich person. At the end of the day, money is what makes the world go around.
Just Speculating
January 7, 2013 at 11:32 AM
A gap year can be good for a immature male, but is really bad advice for a daughter whose looks and fertility will suffer a one-year penalty compared with her peers.
The upper class already knows this, private boarding schools have special programs for 5th year high school seniors who are on the edge of getting into the next tier of schools, focusing even more specifically on college application type materials, and also atheletics. Almost all enrollment are boys, and you’re looking at an extra $50,000 in tuition and boarding, plus college will be an extra $20,000 or so over 4 years because of annual tuition increases.
bob
January 6, 2013 at 11:31 PM
The fifth year of high school is basically for athletes. It also assumes that the male did not redshirt in kindergarten. Do you really think it would benefit a male to a 20 y/o freshman in college against the 18 y/0 Asians?
superdestroyer
January 7, 2013 at 7:54 AM
A lot of 18yo boys are smart but immature, and don’t yet have to discipline to handle college courses.
It would also benefit them in dating to be a year older than the girls in their classes.
bob
January 7, 2013 at 5:13 PM
I relied on a 1400 calibre intellect to handle college courses with a tepid work ethic. Truly smart people can at least pass college courses.
Black_Rose
January 7, 2013 at 6:26 PM
This is spot on. I join to the people that agrees with this while also disliking it. Anyone getting offended by this should start by setting his feelings aside in order to accept and then think of ways to change it.
There is already a post on the other blog about how the government can undermine credentialism by applying tests. The other question is: can a company gain a competitive advantage by ignoring credentials and hiring on IQ criteria? If affirmative, why isn’t anyone doing this now?
javert
January 6, 2013 at 11:54 PM
Don’t Investment Banking firms to this to a lesser extent? They require one to attend a prestige school but many ask explicitly for admission test scores. Those are practically IQ tests.
Black_Rose
January 7, 2013 at 2:22 PM
This blog post essentially sounds like what the stereotypical Asian parent would say.
AsianDude
January 7, 2013 at 12:12 AM
If that’s true, it’s encouraging. It means that the (stereo)typical Asian parent has figured out that for most people, college is about improving one’s career prospects, and that they’re ignoring all the nonsense about how college is “broadening” (or whatever they’re calling it these days).
It also means that the (stereo)typical Asian parent understands the value of connections in the U.S., and doesn’t believe the malarkey that talent and hard work are all that’s necessary to succeed. Asian cultures are very connections-oriented, so if Asian parents understand that connections have value in the U.S., they’ll quickly learn how to play that game the American way to get their kids ahead.
Anthony
January 7, 2013 at 3:30 PM
There is a lot of truth in this comment.
Many commenters in this part of the blogosphere think Asians do not understand the power of connections – this is completely false. What 1st generation Asians do not get is how connections are made in America, not how important it is. In Asia, the culture is that if you went to the same school, you are instantly a connection. In America, the social scene is more clique-ish. The degree to which graduates of top universities “rule” society is much higher in Japan, Korea, and China than here in the US.
AsianDude
January 8, 2013 at 12:30 AM
Vancouver WA has a lot of low-income underclass whites, who have a culture of dysfunction, addiction, and property crime amongst them.
Lance
January 7, 2013 at 12:19 AM
The exception to the rule that you should attend the most prestigious school that will accept you, occurs when you intend to live and work in a particular geographic area. In which case, you can attend the dominant institution in that region as its alumni will be in positions of power and will over-rate your mutual alma mater. For example, if you intend to work and live in Seattle, then attending UW is probably good enough. Of course, most high school graduates have no idea where they plan to live and work for the rest of their lives.
gaiaguy
January 7, 2013 at 3:06 AM
It depends on your career path and your degree. Having an electrical engineering degree from Cal Tech may help more even in Seattle.
Any discussion of college without a discussion of majors or career paths are stupid. Other than the Ivy League and Ivy like students, degree and career path is very important.
superdestroyer
January 7, 2013 at 7:56 AM
I agree.
Lion of the Blogosphere
January 7, 2013 at 8:24 AM
Of course, most high school graduates have no idea where they plan to live and work for the rest of their lives.
Is this really true? Don’t most normal people pretty much want and hope to stay near their families?
Samson
January 7, 2013 at 10:16 AM
Most well-educated young people want to move to a cool city like New York. Sacrificing your career to stay close to one’s parents is lower-class behavior.
Lion of the Blogosphere
January 7, 2013 at 10:41 AM
Lion (ech) is correct here. High performers tend to head to cities like NYC, San Francisco, or Washington DC.
Of my 20 or so closest friends from college (HYP ’04), the only ones who’re now in places other than these three cities are those who went into academia.
Ian
January 7, 2013 at 12:51 PM
Samson,
“I’ll keep it short and sweet. Family, religion, friendship. These
are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.
When opportunity knocks, you don’t want to be driving to a maternity
hospital or sitting in some phony-baloney church. Or synagogue.”
Black_Rose
January 7, 2013 at 3:16 PM
The text body column is too far to the right in this blog. Maybe trying placing whatever the far left column is called on the far right instead to create more centered look. Also, comments at the bottom of the entry makes more sense, as it’s annoying having to scroll up to the title of the entry to comment.
bobo
January 7, 2013 at 4:55 AM
I all honesty, The rate of burglary and many other crimes is dramatically higher in Vancouver than in NYC. For non violent property crimes, the rate in Vancouver actually exceeds places like Los Angeles.
Not only does vancouver have essentially no blacks, it also has essentially no hispanics. What vancouver (and I am talking about Vancouver British Columbia) demonstrates is that if you set up a society where there are very few consequences to breaking in to parked cars or burglarizing houses, huge numbers of white teenagers will engage in those crimes.
Sort of like Lord of the Flies
afd;jksdsakjf
January 7, 2013 at 9:20 AM
Vancouver is only about 1/3 white. The rest is mostly Chinese and East Indian. The East Indians have a lot of gangs.
melykin
January 7, 2013 at 12:12 PM
“what college a person goes to is the single most important key to unlocking a good career track.”
So far so good. But that doesn’t mean an Ivy necessarily. It depends on what “good career track” means to the kid. If you want to work towards being a partner in the tax or accounting practices of a major accounting firm (a job that pays high 6, even 7 figure salaries, in some cases) than an Ivy League degree is overkill, and will even hurt you. HS is blinded by his Manhattan-centrism. There are plenty of good high paying jobs at the “second tier” of the elite, and you don’t need an Ivy League degree to get them – go to NYU, or Boston College or U of Michigan and you’ll be fine. Your basic advice though is very right – high school kids get very little concrete guidance about what schools are really best for their career aspirations.
Peter the Shark
January 7, 2013 at 12:00 PM
Huh? Where did you get the crazy idea that an Ivy degree hurts a career in a Big 4 accounting firm?
Lion of the Blogosphere
January 7, 2013 at 12:24 PM
I worked in one. OK, an Ivy degree doesn’t “hurt” your career there, but it doesn’t guarantee anything. There are very few Ivy Leaguers (HYP anyway) at senior levels at places like PwC or E&Y. The lead partner in our practice once told me he didn’t like Ivy Leaguers – he didn’t think they were “hungry” enough. He wanted smart kids from middle class backgrounds who were grateful for the opportunity. We also didn’t recruit at Ivy’s – we recruited at places like Babson, BC, U of Indiana, UCLA, etc.
The converse is also true – if you go to Harvard or Yale it is also slighly embarassing to be working at an accounting firm – people expect you to be at McKinsey or Goldman, or some cool niche boutique. The Big 4 badge basically tells people “I’m smart, and hard working, but I’m not terribly original and not much of a risk taker.” For someone so clued into status, I’m surprised you aren’t more sensitive to these distinctions.
Peter the Shark
January 8, 2013 at 12:34 PM
PWC Management Consulting tries to hire from top MBA schools only.
Lion of the Blogosphere
January 8, 2013 at 1:49 PM
To be fair, if you’re just looking to get a basic IBD analyst gig , going to a school like Michigan (Ross) or NYU (Stern) can sometimes be even better than going to a school like Brown or Cornell.
Pedigreed people generally fare far better than their state and trade school counterparts when it comes to top-tier opportunities (MBB consulting, real-deal buyside jobs, admission to HSW for their MBAs, etc.), however.
Ian
January 7, 2013 at 1:00 PM
NYU is not a second tier elite (no such thing by the way). In terms of pricing, it’s just as expensive as Columbia, which is an Ivy League.
Accounting is not a “prestigious” profession like BIGLAW, which usually requires an Ivy League or Tier 1 school degree. Top salaries of most senior Big Lawyers are in the 7 figure ranges, top senior accountants in the Big 4 don’t even come close to that. Further, Accounting is more along the STEM fields, saturated with immigrant types who want a stable and well paying career. This is not a sign of prestige.
Just Speculating
January 7, 2013 at 1:28 PM
Even low-ranked schools charge high tuition. The cost of tuition is a bad guide to the prestige of a school.
Accounting is less prestigious than other majors at Ivies, yes, but that doesn’t mean that a prestigious degree doesn’t help career advancement at Big Four.
Lion of the Blogosphere
January 7, 2013 at 1:34 PM
NYU is neither a low-ranking school nor a cheap one. It was formerly known to be a commuter school where only New Yorkers would attend and it’s reputation was less formidable 20 years ago. True, the cost of tuition doesn’t determine prestigiousness, but expensive schools (besides the Ivies) do move up the ranks and eventually become more elitist. By having more money, they are able to invest in infrastructure, beautify their campuses, hire top professors, and provide better mentoring programs. This is what happened to NYU, where it is now a world class institution. If you are not heading to Wall St or practicing BIGLAW, an Ivy League degree is just unnecessary, yet one should consider enrolling in a private school with a name.
Just Speculating
January 7, 2013 at 2:17 PM
The Big 4 are not just accounting firms. The senior partners in the tax , the litigation support or transaction advisory practices can do very very well – certainly low 7 figure salaries. And you don’t need an Ivy League undergrad degree to get that kind of job (although a good MBA is probably becoming more and more necessary).
Peter the Shark
January 8, 2013 at 12:45 PM
Read my blog post on getting a job from college. You should choose a college based on career opportunities.
http://lifeadviceculturalinsights.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/getting-a-job-part-i-school-choice-and-campus-recruiting/
I don’t understand the fascination with elite value transfer jobs (MBB, BB, BIGLAW). Not everyone can get an elite job. You can have a decent salary and live a good life with a non-elite job. You can move up the ladder.
The best colleges for jobs are the Ivy League (and comparable schools) and top state schools (Michigan, UVA, Wisconsin, Berkeley, UCLA, Texas, Washington, etc). If you want an elite “value transference” job, any of these schools will typically give you a chance at getting one, though with some state schools the job may be regional (not in NYC/DC/Boston/SF). Either way, these schools have a lot of companies hiring students, and if you do well, you’ll get a good job. However, if you go to a state school, you can’t major in humanities and get an elite job. You have to major in economics, finance, or math.
If you go to a state school, you can also major in accounting and get a job in audit at BIG 4. Yes, it is boring, but you can make a living and have acceptable exit opportunities.
Ivy League schools don’t offer much in the way of accounting (Harvard famously does not offer courses in accounting as a blogger called Half Sigma discussed here http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/04/no_accounting_a.html). Wharton graduates are unlikely to end up in BIG 4 Audit. Big 4 audit is for state school graduates. You will find Ivy League graduates in BIG 4 advisory or consulting positions, these are considered a step down from MBB and BB in terms of eliteness.
Many of these state schools have engineering programs that are much better than Ivy League engineering programs–there are also great job opportunities with fortune 500 companies if you major in engineering and want to do value creation work.
With few exceptions (Amherst, Williams, CMC), avoid liberal arts colleges. They are typically very expensive with not much recruiting presence from companies. Only attend liberal arts colleges if you want to go to graduate school.
James
January 7, 2013 at 6:36 PM
“I don’t understand the fascination with elite value transfer jobs (MBB, BB, BIGLAW). Not everyone can get an elite job. You can have a decent salary and live a good life with a non-elite job. You can move up the ladder”.
It’s a demographic and privilege issue. Value creation jobs (STEM) are seen as a step down, and they are usually taken by immigrants and minorities. Further, these types of jobs pay significantly less and require a degree in one of the hard sciences which the majority are less inclined to pursue. Citing reasons such as difficulty and boringness are good enough for them to steer away.
However, if the job market for elite value transfer jobs begins to dwindle, as they have for several years already, we might see a change in the future. But I have my doubts, since they are still perceived as less prestigious, because of its predominantly immigrant and minority based demographic.
Just Speculating
January 8, 2013 at 9:43 AM
Simply attending the most selective college possible isn’t always the best choice. For the student with a 1550 SAT or 34 ACT, perhaps, but not necessarily for the student with the 1400 SAT or 31-32 ACT. Many state schools now have honors colleges where the average ACT score is 32 or higher and national merit finalists and other top students get a free ride. Some of these schools offer an outstanding opportunity. No need for a not-quite-there student to spend a lot of money on a selective school when he can be a top dog at a quality honors college and go for free.
See also, “The Campus as a Frog Pond: An Application of the Theory of Relative Deprivation to Career Decisions of College Men” James A. Davis, the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Jul., 1966), pp. 17-31.
ColRebSez
January 7, 2013 at 11:56 PM
Someone with a 1400 SAT is smart enough to do extremely well at even the most competitive schools (yes, that means HYP). The only time I could see them possibly having trouble would be at an ultra-selective tech school like MIT or Caltech.
Ian
January 8, 2013 at 11:16 AM