Men who received an elite college education, how has it made your life better? Would you do anything differently given the chance?

16 comments

  1. What is an elite college education? I went to a city college (Pitt) got my bachelors and a masters in 5 years. Is that elite?

  2. I got a doctorate in gender studies. It’s served me so well. I was able to open my own gender studies factory and I employ over 80 people. On top of that we produce some of the best gender studies in the country.

  3. i didn’t get an “elite” education (U of Illinois), but my brother graduated from Yale. my wife was cum laude at Harvard and first in her class at UCLA dental school, the top dental school in the US.

    i then continued to my Ph.D, which i no longer use because apathy in education wrecked my motivation, so now i barely work and i live on my wife’s very substantial wealth. so it goes.

    ​

    in my brother’s case, he’s an investment banker. not that he’s particularly happy, but that’s a different tale.

    my wife owns a dental practice and practices specialty dentistry, catering to a certain type of clientele.

    i guess her credentials prop up her credibility.

    but if she’d attended a run of the mill dental school she’d probably only be slightly less wealthy. not many dentists are struggling to survive, especially with all the sugar americans consume.

  4. I’ve got 2 degrees in business from my dream school (public). I love my job and use my education every day. Please bring this “Elite” bullshit. No student debt btw.

  5. I went to UCF for my undergrad and Penn for my VMD and PhD. I did my residency at UC Davis in Large Animal Surgery. I am blessed for the opportunities I had at the educational level. I would not change my education it has helped me for the last 25 years. I retired from clinical practice in 2020 because of the pandemic and health reasons.

  6. It gave me a bit of an educational / work ethic advantage but not as profound as my early education advantage which got me into those places in the first place.

    The real benefit is my former uni friends are also successful and I can reach out to them for advantages in their fields, similar to them doing it with me.

    Edit; Looking at the other replies just to be clear my universities were contenders for best in the world.

  7. Didn’t make much of a difference for me aside from people assuming I’m smart when I tell them where I went to school. I was a poor/lazy student though and didn’t network. My first job out of college virtually everyone I worked with had graduated from one of the local state schools.

  8. I went to Oxford and later Imperial. Somehow managed to hoodwink the interviewers.

    I have a medical degree and a Master’s in neuroscience.

    Oxford in particular nearly killed me (but then I did have undiagnosed ADHD, so that didn’t exactly help.)

    But no, I wouldn’t change it. Rightly or wrongly, it opens doors in your career. People are always impressed that you’re an Oxford graduate.

    Even other doctors are impressed, which is particularly weird to me.

    Before that, I went to public school, and I come from money. I don’t say that to brag, it’s nothing I’ve done; my privileged background is just an accident of birth.

    I am fully cognizant of how my upbringing has positively influence my life.

    AMA, I guess.

    Edit: just to be clear, I’m not so rich that I don’t need to work!

  9. I have done MBA twice, once from a top 10 Bschool in my country and the second time from Harvard/Stanford

    Opportunities. People take you seriously. The tag matters because firms often plop down graduates from these colleges in front of clients. The name of the university sells business, opens doors and I would say I don’t have to worry about unemployment much since the alumni network is ridiculous and so is the brand name.

    Would I do anything different? Yes and no. The path would remain the same but I would definitely motivate myself differently. My original motivations for attending these colleges were unhealthy

  10. I went to one of “the best” independent schools in Britain.

    It was an all-boys school: that’ll fuck you up for a start. Most my teachers were male which, in a way, I’m grateful for.

    It gave me a posh accent that gets me preferential treatment.

    The school was an academic pressure cooker. Once I left it I just wanted to be lazy, avoid work, and I’ve spent most my adult life trying to make up for what I (probably mistakenly) felt I’d missed out on in adolescence.

    Peter Pan syndrome until I die probably.

    All in all it’s a bit of a con though: they do well in the league tables because they take the smartest kids and expel the kids who won’t get the exam results – the teaching was mediocre.

    If I could have been my own parent I’d have sent my ADHD self to dance school: as an adult I realised that’s what I enjoy the most in life.

  11. Yale here.

    IDK if Yale itself made my life better as much as the goods I got that got me into Yale and thru my life.

  13. I’ve been to/at a LOT of schools: small, private engineering uni, huge public uni, Ivy League, giant public engineering uni, and now I work at a small public uni.

    Each has its ups and downs, and a lot depends upon whether you’re undergrad, graduate, or working there. The best for one level might not be the best for another.

    IMHO the biggest factor is going above and beyond, whatever the school level. Sure, you can attend the minimum of classes, cram before exams, and leave with a degree at any of these schools (assuming you can handle the coursework). But the students who really excelled, including at schools which weren’t famous names, were those who really engaged with the coursework, focused on actually understanding rather than cramming, and did undergrad research in faculty labs. If I get a PhD application from Cornell with a decent GPA but never set foot in a real lab and one from Nowhere University where they also worked in a lab for 3 years and coauthored 2 papers, I’m going with the one who actually did real science.

    You can squander an education at Harvard and you can set yourself up for success at Nowhere University, but it’s on you. Nobody will deny school name matters, but smart people look beyond the name.

  14. Went to undergrad at “the #1 US school” at the time years back, and looking back there’s a lot to be said about everyone around you being driven and multi-talented. But there’s also a lot of fucked up expectations and imposter syndrome that comes after that when that’s what you’re measuring against at the young age of 18-22.

    So, mixed bag, it helped me set high expectations for my work ethic but also puts you around a lot of nervously type-A people too. And it certainly was not necessary for me to be happy or find success in what I wanted to do in life. It didn’t directly help me get any jobs other than my first one (which is unrelated to my current career). Now it’s more of a trivia fact about me that rarely comes up. I had a great time though.

    It only is an obvious life assist if you’re planning to go to a big grad school (law, med, etc) or into finance at a high level. Otherwise it’s helpful but not in a golden ticket way.

  16. I went to a top-25 college in the US. Mostly, it means not ever having to apologize for my education. Could I do everything I do now without it? Yes. But I would always have to explain and apologize to people for why I didn’t follow the standard educational path. Having a respectable college degree avoids this.

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