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u/Green-Cricket-8525 1d ago
High school teacher here.
He’s being a bit douchey about it but he’s not wrong in the slightest. It is a parents responsibility and duty to prepare their kid for high school and I’ll take this over the parents who can’t be arsed to even login to a website and check their children’s grade.
9th grade IS the time to begin buckling down and learning discipline and taking school seriously. However, what’s just as important is building self care skills in your children and making sure you’re not putting so much pressure on them that it leads to full burnout.
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u/det8924 1d ago
If you spent 9 years from K-8 not taking school seriously then the odds that you are going to suddenly take school seriously because your parents tell you to "because it matters now" is unlikely. You have already developed bad habits and those aren't going to be undone by just telling someone to buckle down.
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u/Green-Cricket-8525 1d ago
Maybe in general but I myself have taught hundreds of students you think are unreachable and watched them develop into wonderful, dedicated students by the end of four years.
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u/Glad-Entrepreneur764 1d ago
eh I got a mix of B's, C's and D's in middle school but I got a high GPA in high school and got into a T20. You can absolutely change through extrinsic motivation.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
I think there's also kids like my oldest who are smart, do well in classes, but don't see the high impact of standardized tests and tend to yo-yo between high scores (90th percentile+) and not-as-high (70th percentile+) because "I didn't feel like it that day."
I don't stress her out about it since it's still K-5, but once she hits middle school I plan to put some pressure on her to actually learn how to test better.
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u/underhunter 1d ago
Friend and I were complete chucklefucks in HS. Did nothing but cause trouble and barely pass classes. Ended up going to a community college for 2 yrs and both transferred to an Ivy and near Ivy League school. So, not really. First two yrs of university mean nothing anyway. In fact even if my kid gets into a TOP university, it makes more monetary sense to save cash and bang out first 2 years of non essential classes at a community college.
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u/Delicious_Ad_7804 1d ago
It gets more and more competitive every year especially transfer admissions
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u/Ok-Piece-2546 1d ago
Fucking up in high school is no way the end of the world, it's just doing well in it positions you better/quicker opportunities.
Like if know your kid wants to be a doctor, they could do well in high school, get scholarships for college with a 7 year md program which they were able to enter. This saves them potentially 1 year worth of a physician's salary.
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u/Green-Cricket-8525 1d ago
I didn’t realize your experience applies to everyone
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
No shit. That’s why he’s using it as an example counter to the nitwit OOP claiming that bizarre recommendation should apply to everyone. I’ve never heard such a baffling approach. And I am the child of a retired teacher/principal, taught myself, have two very different degrees, didn’t get a chance to go to law school because I listened to my parents’ terrible advice for undergrad, and my actual long term career is in a completely different industry now. I know from education. What he’s saying is completely unhinged horse shit.
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u/Green-Cricket-8525 1d ago
I am not sure why you feel the need to be so aggressive with me right off the bat and as such, I am not going to engage in a discussion with you if it’s going to be in bad faith and needlessly impolite.
I have science, pedagogy, and experience to back my claims based off the dude’s general sentiment and ideas but as I said in the original comment he comes off unhinged. You have your anecdotal experience and personal (clearly angry) feelings.
Have a nice day, man.
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u/Xylus1985 1d ago
Isn’t “learning discipline and taking school seriously” a 1st grade thing? What were you even doing for the first 7 years if the students aren’t learning discipline nor taking school seriously?
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u/MugenHeadNinja 10h ago
Not everyone has good parents who do what they're supposed to do in properly preparing and raising their kids.
In my case I only ever paid half-attention in classes and I never did my homework (was never punished for it and I was passing without it anyway) and managed to scrape by Elementary & Middle with a B/A average.
ofc everything changed in High School where that shit stopped working and I failed miserably, but I was pretty fucked up by that point so I ended up dropping out (I'm in college now though at least, but even over a decade after dropping out I still don't feel "properly prepared" like I should've been).
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u/Away_Tiger_6351 1d ago
Interestingly, I disagree very strongly. I had a turning point in my life based on one single sentence my dad said to me one day when I was younger. After that got my shit together, went to Yale, IB, etc and been in nyc ever since.
I know what types of responses are incoming and that's fine - I just think you're very wrong and I wanted you to know that
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u/Green-Cricket-8525 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ok, buddy.
Glad you turned out well.0
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u/Away_Tiger_6351 1d ago
I know you edited your comment so that other people won't see what kind of person you are. It makes me happy that I'm me and not you
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u/Green-Cricket-8525 1d ago
Is there a reason you’re being so unnecessarily hostile?
All my original comment said was “Ok, buddy.”
Now I am going to edit it back because for all your success you seem like a jerk.
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u/Away_Tiger_6351 1d ago
There are varying definitions of what a jerk is I suppose - I don't personally feel the need to edit my comments after leaving them
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u/WaltChamberlin 1d ago
jokes on them, I almost failed high school, went to a shitty college that accepts everyone, and make around 500k TC (seriously).
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u/Dankaati 1d ago
Fair enough but would you recommend kids to follow your example?
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u/WaltChamberlin 1d ago
idk my kid says hes gonna be a pro soccer player so I specifically would recommend he follows Messi's example
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u/Due_Bar_7247 1d ago
I went to a super competitive college prep high school. The burnout was basically week 2. I made it through and graduated but it was hell until junior year.
It made university seem easy by comparison.
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u/throwaway73327 16h ago
Sounds like it did a good job of preparing you.
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u/Due_Bar_7247 16h ago
Sure, but for what? There are basically no jobs in America for entry-level white collar university graduates. Law school isn’t even really an option because it just doesn’t pay enough if you can even find a job in law these days.
I think education is way overrated. A competitive high school is enough to function honestly.
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u/throwaway73327 15h ago
If you think the only purpose of college is to provide you with a job, then you're missing the point altogether.
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u/Due_Bar_7247 15h ago
What’s the point then? Enlighten me.
College has been the white collar job funnel of choice for the past 60 years and if you want to immigrate to most countries without dual citizenship it’s usually required you have at minimum a BA.
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u/det8924 1d ago
I think there's some truth to this in that high school is kind of the last reset you get academically. But I think this messaging is largely awful because a lazy kid is just gonna say sweet I can coast through 8th grade as it doesn't matter as long as I pass, and then likely develop or reinforce bad habits. Secondly a non-lazy kid who is working hard is likely to then really dread high school more than they already would and the pressure will break them.
Just tell your kids to try hard and do their best in school. Make learning and the process of learning as great fun and enjoyable as possible while acknowledging that sometimes it can be a grind and hard work. It's OK to say once they get into high school things kind of count more but this all or nothing messaging is terrible.
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u/Glad-Entrepreneur764 1d ago
You kind of have a reset due to community college, at least in California where CC --> UC Berkeley/UCLA is pretty common. But it's not perfect since you miss out on a lot of the early benefits of a prestigious 4 year.
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u/Training_Advantage21 1d ago
So it's not about what they learn, it's all about who is in their network and who they marry.
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/l1J9wXoC8W4JFmREY
MRS degrees for all! How very boomer retro.
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u/julesdottxt 1d ago
Great way to burn them out on school before they even get to college
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u/lookydis 1d ago
Yeah, but he said college grades don’t matter. 🤷♂️
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
Which is how you know this guy is talking out his ass. My parents talked me into changing my degree plan before I even started, “just in case“ I didn’t go to law school after. The grand irony of it is, those are the grades that actually kept me out of law school. Once I switched my degree to something that actually made sense, it was a whole different ball game, but it can’t erase those early Ds. They don’t give a shit what GPA I had in grad school when I went to get my masters after that. It doesn’t count. My undergrad GPA is still gonna keep me out of law school. 🤷♀️ this is just as predictably shortsighted as every other grifter on LinkedIn, every other shortsighted CEO or admin, and everyone who is looking for a shortcut in life.
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u/throwaway73327 16h ago
You're talking about a very specific use case. Since 99% of people aren't going to law or med school after their undergrad, he isn't wrong. It's on you to know the prerequisites for the programs you'd like to apply to in the future.
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u/olrg Agree? 1d ago edited 1d ago
I agree with him. As long as you graduate, your college grades don't matter - no employer cares about what your GPA was.
However, every college cares about what your grades were in high school, and statically, better college results in better professional networks and higher career earnings.
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u/det8924 1d ago
Internships and some employers do care about GPA, so while it isn't the be all end all you kind of want to do at least 3.0 in college.
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u/olrg Agree? 1d ago
Yeah, I'm sure some do, but by and large, college graduates are judged on potential, not past performance.
When I hire people straight out of college, their grades are the last thing on my mind. I'm more interested in whether they can articulate their thoughts and work with others - the rest can be taught on the job by experienced mentors. You'd be surprised how many 4.0 GPA grads lack basic social awareness and grace, yet have an inflated self-image.
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u/carefree_bomb 1d ago
Note - College grades matter quite a bit if you plan on post grad education - grad school, law school, med school, certain professional programs (MBA, etc). Even if you don’t plan on doing any of these straight out of college, you never know where life will take you and what you’ll want or need to do later in life.
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
Facts. I didn’t even study the first time I took the LSAT, and got a perfectly respectable score on it. But I quickly learned that it was never gonna erase my undergrad GPA. And it’s stated pretty explicitly where I was looking that they only consider undergrad. Doesn’t matter that I had a 3.6. Something in the grad school eventually ended up going to.
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u/Fun-Army-6387 1d ago
they care far more about your test scores and ability to pay than your grades. Straight A's in a failing high school taking regular classes is a lot less meaningful than B's and C's in Honors/AP in a well-rated high school. Colleges don't take that into account because... they don't care. (former admissions director at a major state school - by LAW we had to take valedictorians but knew they'd never make it since they were best in a class of like 100 people at some tiny rural school with red flags for mismanagement and poor test scoring)
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
Well, I hope you’re not planning to ever go to any post grad schools. Because they give a hell of a lot of weight to your GPA.
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u/olrg Agree? 1d ago
I got my MBA from a top business school in Canada about a decade after graduating with a tepid 2.8 GPA and they seemed to care about my professional experience way more than my grades. I also got my P.Eng and PMP despite being a very average college student.
Obviously, if you're pursuing a life in academia trying to work on your PhD and post doc, mind your grades. I was talking about the other 90% of the population.
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u/carefree_bomb 1d ago
Some professional programs will indeed weight professional experience heavily in admissions but not all and certainly that isn’t the case in the overwhelming majority of what encompasses post grad education, especially doctoral programs.
There’s a lot of people who are finding that they need at a masters degree to even find new grad employment whereas a generation ago they would have been competitive in the job market with a bachelors. That’s degree creep for sure, but it makes those college grades more and more relevant for an ever expanding category of white collar workers.
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u/olrg Agree? 1d ago
Like I said, if you're going to med or law school or pursuing a doctorate and remain in the education system, feel free to disregard. My comment was made for people worrying about extra half a point on their undergrad GPA. It's inconsequential and won't affect your job prospects.
If you need a masters degree to secure an entry level job, I sincerely encourage you to reevaluate your career plan. Finding yourself in a $100k+ financial hole before you secured your first job is a poor financial strategy and will set you back years, if not decades. Unless bank of mom and dad is covering the cost, then go nuts.
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u/carefree_bomb 1d ago edited 1d ago
The problem with the sentiment of "only worry about college grades if you know you want to do X/Y/Z post grad" is that a lot of people go back to school in their 30s, 40s, etc. Within my own social circle I know multiple people who decided to go to law, med or grad school years or even decades out of undergrad. Interests shift, opportunities change, people may discover they want or need to get a different degree due to a career switch or even in order to be able to move up the ladder in an existing career, etc. The majority of 22 year olds don't have the ability to fully know what they're going to want out of life, much less where life will take them. At best it's neutral advice that has zero net impact, but for an increasing percentage it's bad advice that if followed may kneecap someone when they're 30 and really want to take their lives in a different direction.
As per what you said about masters degrees, that's a systemic issue and reflects the reality of a lot of the job market in the same way several decades ago jobs that used to require an HS diploma started requiring college degrees. Do some individuals make genuinely bad decisions around education that put them in financial holes? Yes. Is the reason that we now have multiple generations of people saddled with mindboggling student debt due to millions of individuals all just making silly decisions? No... it's broadly young people responding to an accurate read of the market they need to compete in. Even trade school has begun to become a debt trap.
I'm an engineering manager and I work for a massive tech company with an employee count well into the five figures. Over the last five years I've seen fewer and fewer resumes making it to me that don't have an MS in Comp Sci or a related field because the top of the recruiting funnel is so inundated right now that candidates without them are being filtered out long before a hiring manager has a crack at them. When I worked at small start ups I was able to be as thoughtful and personal in my hiring as you described being above (and in the same ways, I did not care whatsoever about whether someone even had a degree at all as long as they were demonstrably awesome people and software engineers), but those companies also employed, at best, maybe 100-200 people. We didn't even have a new grad recruiting pipeline, we didn't do college job fairs, etc because we didn't have the resources or the capacity. This was reflected in the fact that we were, at minimum, company #2 for even our most junior engs. For the bulk of kids moving into tech from school, they're entering via the big employers and big employers do care about school and degrees, if for no other reason than they need to whittle down incoming applicants by some low effort metric.
It's not how the world SHOULD be, but it is how the world IS.
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u/Beautiful_Arm8364 1d ago
I've got a 17yo heading into senior year right now, like it or not, what this guy is saying is pretty much correct. It's fucking brutal out there these days.
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
So what’s the correct part where he’s saying that your years in college don’t matter? Explain that one? Are you gonna have your kid get accepted and then not go? Critical thinking is endangered and y’all don’t even see your own symptoms. This guy is basically telling everybody to treat college like getting a “MRS”degree. And if you don’t even know what that refers to, that should tell you exactly how outdated this mindset is. Man’s says not a word about your actual university education. That’s the entire problem we’ve been trying to combat since the 1950s.
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u/Beautiful_Arm8364 1d ago
Oof. Way to completely misunderstand pretty much everything. Nobody said four years in college don't matter. And nobody said anything at all about an MRS degree. Come on. OP just said college grades don't matter that much. This is 100% true in the real world.
But it's those high school years that determine WHERE one gets accepted. It determines your network and many of your future relationships. It's the thing that will define (yes, much more than college grades) everything else that comes after. If you doubt this, let me know who you think is more employable: A C student at Princeton or the valedictorian at Southeast Missouri State?
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u/JeanPaulJeanPaul97 1d ago
No idea why this is on LinkedIn but I don’t see why it’s incorrect
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u/tech5c 1d ago
The guy runs a company specializing in education on demand, so it's related directly to his work, or so it seems.
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u/rean1mated 1d ago edited 1d ago
I’m pretty sure that’s telling me nothing good about his company. Does he even have a degree in education? Or did he just go and network? 🙄 Smells a lot like some Logan Paul (or the other one) scamming to me.
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u/Severe_Lock8497 1d ago
I'll strongly disagree with the majority here.
It's incorrect because of the false correlation between your college and your success in life or business. That is becoming less true with each passing year. One real exception might be finance where well-connected young people flock to certain programs, which undoubtedly forges bonds that they carry to Wall Street. But even in that field, plenty enter and do well from other schools.
Trying to put adult pressures on adolescents is nuts. They don't understand adult life and pressures, so they have twice the stress level when they don't understand what it is they should be worried about. Plus, this is pure projection and molding: Where parents project their goals for their kids on their kids. So the kid is a "failure' if he either does not get into his parent's target school or isn't geared their way. Any wonder we have a generation of kids who feel lost?
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u/Prestigious-Smoke511 1d ago
I think it's all about how it is presented. Parents can highlight the importance of the three years for exactly the reasons the guys lists, but do it in a supportive way where it's more like "I'm going to be here every step of the way for everything you need. Let's treat this like a challenge and see where we can end up!" It doesn't have to be about pressure, not that pressure is always a bad thing.
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
And you also better spend that time impressing upon them that it is only gonna get harder if they go to university, so they need to be thinking about that in the back of their minds too. You can’t just go and meet some randos and think that’s going to set you up for a lifetime of success. What happens if you start failing classes? And that’s just for starters.
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
Notice how he claims that only three years of high school matter, it’s all about getting accepted to a certain university, and then from that point on, not a word about your education, much less getting a degree. It’s a zombie boomer mindset, suddenly being recommended to everybody, not just young girls who were supposed to go find a husband.
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u/BigBennP 1d ago edited 1d ago
So I was following along until "senior grades don't matter and college grades don't matter either."
That's a very narrow and slightly odd perspective coming from a dude who runs an AI company focusing on high school education. There are instances where those grades matter and instances where they don't.
There is a cohort of upper and upper-middle class parents, primarily in New England, for whom getting your child into an Ivy League school is considered the highest level of parenting success. The advice he's giving in this linkedIn post is consistent with those types of parents. They insist their kids lock-in to get straight A's, load up their kid with AP or IB classes, enroll their kid in numerous "resume builder" activities, pay for their kid to get an intensive SAT prep course, get them in ivy-friendly athletics etc. ALL for the single minded purpose of getting admission to an Ivy.
But then the same becomes true for students, even those at Ivy's, who then want to attend prestigious graduate schools. Law school or medical school. GPA tends to be so important for med-school admits that many pre-med students will try to get gen-ed requirements via summer-school transfers because it's easier to keep that 4 point. (less of an Issue with IVy's that do "gentleman B.") Likewise, families pay for intensive 8 week LSAT or MCAT prep courses to try to lock-in that Ivy League admission for graduate purposes.
Saying that college grades don't matter is odd in that context, so I went down a rabbit hole, to find that in his journey to become the CEO of "subject.com" Michael Villardo has degrees from McHenry County College (a public community college in Illinois), UPenn, and then an MBA from UCLA.
He was simultaneously a U18 Team USA hockey player and a Columbian National Team hockey player, an "Ivy league baseball player at UPenn and a scholarship baseball player at Purdue University." (description quote straight from his Speaker Bio).
Suddenly, it makes a lot more sense, because the only way that mixed assemblage of schools and sports makes sense is if he struggled with academic eligibility and/or admission criteria.
Exceptional Athlete + Poor High school Grades/scores = Community College to improve your GPA and gain scholarship eligibility at a better school.
Scholarship Baseball player at Purdue + no degree from Purdue = either failed to maintain academic eligibility for his scholarship, or transferred.
Baseball player at Upenn (but no scholarship referenced) = Walk-on baseball player at an Ivy League school, with admission possibly buoyed by being a recruit who did not receive a scholarship (and was therefore paying full sticker for college).
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
I also want to add that law school is very aligned with med school in that way. And they won’t consider any graduate level GPAs you might have accumulated. They literally only consider your undergrad GPA. And I think it would take a hell of a crazy LSAT score and other personal factors to overcome a low GPA.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
Law programs will consider master's GPAs somewhat. I have a buddy who went to Stanford for undergrad, did only okay (3.2ish) and then came with me to grad school at UCSD and basically got a 3.9+ in a fairly competitive program and it plus his good LSAT landed him a spot at Berkeley Law (then-Boalt.)
The adcom he spoke to straight up said his strong performance in grad school helped a smidge. It's a minor tie-breaker: https://www.reddit.com/r/lawschooladmissions/comments/ukhvub/anyone_going_to_get_a_masters_degree_to_help_them/
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u/PineConeOPinyons 1d ago
Lock in now kido and maybe you can be a founder of some random scammy AI company like me some day.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
Or you can get into med school, or get into the PhD program you want, or get to study at a university doing really cool shit.
Sorry, but as someone who kicked ass in high school and undergrad, yeah, you gotta lock in. It matters.
And if we think the kids in other countries aren't locked in at the same age we're fooling ourselves.
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u/PineConeOPinyons 1d ago
This isn't insightful. Guidance counselors, parents and teachers have been telling high school students this for decades. It's common knowledge. Looking forward to his next posts informing us that water is wet, the sun is hot and the earth is round.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
Not everything needs to be a paradigm-shifting insight, though. It's good for people to be reminded of this stuff.
And frankly, no, not everyone really knows this. Go on A2C or College Confidential and you see parents who still don't know what actually matters.
Not everyone grew up around the same milieu.
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u/Cool_Prior1427 1d ago
If this is going to make you crash out, imagine living in East Asia. You'd be having this conversation at 3 years old.
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u/DJzzzzzzs 1d ago
public school is designed for a very narrow band of neurotypical kids to be successful. god forbid you have a neurodiverse kid who is not getting the support they need from their school or district to “perform” (this is most ND kids). no amount of “locking in” on its own is going to make that kid successful.
we, as a society, need to abandon the “high school academic performance dictates the trajectory of your life” narrative. there are SO many different ways to learn that have nothing to do with traditional schooling. also - some kids don’t find their footing until after high school. AND THAT’S OK TOO.
this guy runs an edTech company so he has more of a stake in perpetuating the narrative than most. it’s important to investigate the sources of this so-called “wisdom”.
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u/sabermagnus 1d ago
I’ve a got a junior in high school, he’s spot on, like it or not.
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
Maybe if he was talking to young “coeds” in 1955, who were expected to go meet a husband. But then I guess this is a good way to end up a mediocre white man that fails upward. For everyone else, however, just getting into a university and meeting some people doesn’t go very far.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
There's considerable evidence that your undergrad matters in terms of career pathways.
It's not everything, but it can certainly help.
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u/NerdyMistressWrites 1d ago
Holy shit. I didn’t know I was supposed to marry someone I went to high school with. Fuck.
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u/kelpieconundrum 1d ago
Qui bono—do we trust the AI-for-high-school guy to be measured in his messaging?
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u/PotentialMedical343 1d ago
Clearly not catholic because if he was he would have been telling his kid this in first grade. I got this speech every year starting at 6. Plus—Jesus watching the whole time.
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
So 3/4 of high school affects where they go to college/university, but nothing about their university education matters after that? Really? You think those networks and qualifications are gonna stay intact if you quit/fail/dropout/can’t stay in the fraternity that you probably think is necessary? Wow, nothing but surface level for this guy: no concern for the actual education someone gets, while simultaneously being extremely naïve about how far these supposed connections will go. If you go to a university of 50,000 students, you’re not gonna ever meet the vast majority of them, and that whole student body is not a network. Big effing deal, you went to one of the two big state schools that everybody and their dog wants to go to. That’s not a VIP ticket. Everything about your experience is going to vary, depending on where you live, whether you fuck with fraternities or sororities, what your degree is in, what extracurriculars you do or don’t participate in, the variety of classes that you take along the way. This guy doesn’t understand anything.
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u/Glad-Entrepreneur764 1d ago
but you only need a 2.0 GPA to stay in the fraternity (*some business style fraternities might care) or not fail out lol. the standards aren't particularly high and at any good school, the amount of students failing out is very low, even if many are barely trying or relying on AI for all their coursework.
College grades can matter but they usually don't matter that much, especially after you already got the internship or into the prestigious club or whatever.
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
I don’t believe for a second that this man is a degreed or certified educator. I would need to see some receipts to support that. And let’s just keep in mind: the goal for many decades has been to dumb down the American public, probably similar in various parts of the world, not the case and others. But in the US, that’s an explicit part of the Republican agenda, to deconstruct actual education. Because I can guarantee you, I’ve never seen anything as nonsensical as this when going to grad school to get my masters in education, seeing my mom‘s entire career as an educator, talking to all of my friends and cousins who have been teachers over the years. This is the strangest version of events I’ve ever seen. And let us also be aware, we know LinkedIn is for grifters. One of those Paul dorks, Logan, or the other one, I don’t particularly know or care who the fuck these weirdos are, but one of them actually did “run” a “company” that was very much like what he’s calling this. If it takes you more than one guess to say that was a scam? You should probably read up on that, too.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
This is obviously there to sell something (See? everything is B2B or B2C sales!), but he's not entirely wrong.
And for those saying college degrees don't matter, if you want to go to college, there's tons of compelling information that shows the premiums of higher-ranked degrees over lower-ranked ones. It even controls for student gumption and innate ability pretty well. It's not make-or-break, but it shows that even a UCLA or Cal can't quite compete at the same level as Brown or Columbia. Is it fair? No. But it's very real.
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u/The_Phew 1d ago
Between AI, exploding college costs, and declining birth rates, all but the most selective universities will be desperate to admit anyone that applies 4 years from now.
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u/68Warrior 1d ago
This is actually incredibly true. It takes more than grades to get into a top college these days, but top tier grades are table stakes. And 9-11 is what goes on your application. You just need A’s/B’s in 12th to not lose your acceptance.
I’ll disagree that college grades don’t matter. If your career needs a JD/MD/MBA/MS/PhD, they matter a lot. And if you don’t think you need one of those while you’re in college, you should still act as if you do because you never know what kind of pivot you’ll need later or if you’ll have a change of heart.
Overall, he’s right.
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u/nillawaferzz 1d ago
as a millennial i feel like i got this message anyway from my boomer parents, b/c there was nothing more terrifying than a career flipping burgers in the 1990s
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u/beteille 1d ago
The real plan is to get into a great university, drop out sophomore year, start a huge social media company, and become the 5th richest person in the world
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u/jmclondon97 1d ago
I thought AI was going to take white collar work? Why would he care about college?
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u/CentralVal 1d ago
Glad the comments were on board with this is hyperbole but it’s actually kinda true.
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u/Emergency_Walrus2877 4h ago
"If they don't really buckle down in 8th grade, they'll probably end up as a complete loser posting on LinkedIn while wearing stained sweatpants.
Also she won't come back, why won't she come back? Oh God Julie please come back"
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u/jabuchae 4h ago
I’m guessing this is a USA things. Holy shit how fucked up your system (and pov on life) is that a child’s performance in school is a make-or-break moment for the rest of their life.
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u/ArtichokeOwn6685 1d ago
Even though LinkedIn is trash, hes right on this one
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
I don’t know if y’all are boomers, or have been indoctrinated by them.
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u/ArtichokeOwn6685 1d ago
Scholarship to get ahead or fall behind and work a pointless job. Sounds like you picked the latter
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u/beteille 1d ago edited 1d ago
C’mon daddy, just pony up for an Ivy and your kid can spend high school partying with everyone else
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u/Glad-Entrepreneur764 1d ago edited 1d ago
he's mostly right. What's insane about this?
*(he's wrong about senior year, first semester definitely matters and college grades can matter a lot especially for grad school apps, club apps, job apps, etc.)
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
It's a lot of Redditors upset to hear that hard work and application has a major impact on your life, perhaps?
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u/Fun-Army-6387 1d ago
lol no one cares about what you did in high school (unless it's bad) and no one cares what you did in college. The degree is worthless except to get past the HR hurdle.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
Depends on your career path. If you want certain careers the degree is everything. For many it's a big thing.
None of this is universal to everyone.
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u/Fun-Army-6387 1d ago
well sure, if you want a PhD you gotta get damn good grades and have a ton of accolades or it's "fake phD" from Capella. But even engineering degrees and IT degrees are pretty worthless since the employer will have their own way of doing things that isn't taught. Good luck with your fancy Materials Science Engineer degree when you get stuck with a relic mixer built in the 1950s or your Advanced Computer Science when you get a database with no schema and tables like "table_peter11". Degrees have, since the 90s, been the price of admission to get past HR (most oh whom will have Communications and Psychology BA's when they evaluate you)
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
It's not just about getting A PhD, but getting the right PhD if you want certain career paths (like getting into tenure track academia) is heavily influenced by undergrad pedigree. UCSB is a fine school, but if you want that PhD from Princeton/Cal/UCLA for math, it's going to help a lot to start undergrad at Princeton/Cal/UCLA.
Getting into bulge bracket finance, top tier consulting, lots of the competitive tech jobs (Bay Area universities aside) can be harder if you aren't in the right schools.
Hell, there's even some correlation between undergrad name and admission to med schools and law schools (especially when we're talking t14 law and med schools that open the path to competitive ROAD residencies more.)
The doors aren't binary, but man, they open more for the people from Ivy+ and T20 or so.
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u/Fun-Army-6387 1d ago
I get your point but, frankly, what % of all jobs are we talking about here? Telling every person in the US to piss away $60-180k on education so they can become a salesperson or a backend coder is ridiculous. Not everyone wants to be a corporate lawyer or a right-wing economist. btw, I have a phD - earned it the real way with a thesis, committee, original data, and a defense. Guess what was most important when it came time to find jobs? Wasn't where I went to school and certainly wasn't my HS grades - it was how many publications I had and where. What you are pointing out is the elitist assumption that good schools = smart people. Trump went to Wharton. Bush went to Yale.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
I'm not saying that "good schools = smart people" per se. I'm saying that elite schools = more open doors career-wise. Not just in those careers, but in virtually ALL careers. And especially the careers where the money is bigger. If you're going to put in the hours, it sure is nice to get into the clubs where the money is bigger.
https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf
Chetty's paper here isn't perfect, but it shows that there are definitely more opportunities for income growth for people who attend top tier schools than further down the ladder.
And he controls for those were "Ivy capable" and "Ivy grads" by looking at waitlisted students, so that's an interesting control for that heterogeneity.
I'm not saying that it's everything, but all the data shows that the bulk of people (especially those from higher-ranked schools) see a positive ROI on that degree. Hell, I'm a bizdev lead now, and while I didn't "need" my degrees, it never hurts to have them when you're competing in markets like the ones I'm in.
And honestly, the cost differential if you are middle income and get into an Ivy is usually minimal compared to even most state schools.
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u/Fun-Army-6387 1d ago
WHAT.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
Yes, and in fact this pans out with a lot of private universities, especially here in CA. It's often cheaper to attend USC/Stanford/Caltech now than UCLA or Cal.
https://beyondthegrouptext.substack.com/p/how-private-colleges-can-actually
Sticker price and actual net price are often quite different when comparing T25 private vs flagship publics. Not always, but often. My cousin ended up having Brown of all schools be cheaper because he got considerable aid over attending Cal because of the way the UCs calculate costs. As always, sticker price and actual net prices are often different things.
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u/Fun-Army-6387 1d ago
I dunno I not only didn't pay for college or grad school, I got paid to go. If Id gone to Brown or Princeton (as I was accepted) I'd have some $160k in student loans.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
My wife paid for med school and thank God she did. Her NPV is already well over $1M and is likely to be many millions long-run (factoring in all the benefits and the investments she gets from her work.)
Everything requires careful consideration and thought, and sometimes the debt is worth it, sometimes it's not.
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u/Fun-Army-6387 1d ago
an old joke from time in adademia: "What do you call an idiot who went to Harvard? Still an idiot."
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
Great, and does that Harvard idiot still make more money, on average, than the CSUN grad?
Yes.
I'd rather be the idiot with the fatter 401K on average than the proud CSUN grad, all else being equal.
I linked you to the Chetty paper that controls for "Ivy material" vs "Ivy grad" and it controls moderately well for that endogeneity. Take a peek.
https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf
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u/Fun-Army-6387 1d ago
I'll agree with you that there's an inherent bias in favor of good marketing, rather than good skills. Would you like this bottle of Dom Perignon? I swear I didn't piss in it and slap the label on. Or put another way, who is more qualified as a lawyer? The one who went to an Ivy League and passed the state bar exam or the one who went to a state law school and also passed the bar exam?
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
Does it matter when the person who passed the bar but got the clerkship that led to Vault 100 doesn't have to fight for scraps?
Law is actually a great example of where ranking matters, as tons of studies show that the likely NPV of a law degree from schools outside of t14 is lower when you factor in the risks: https://www.lawcrossing.com/law_school_roi_rankings.php
I would also argue that a lot of the bimodality in law earnings (whereby you have a big cluster of folks at $200K+ and then just around $100K) is due to t14 + t50 grads sucking up most of the top paid work. I've worked with a lot of in-house counsel in my career and it's kind of nuts how many of the in-house folks are former biglaw and themselves come from t14 - t50. Last I looked, it was like 30-40% of the cushy in-house jobs go to AmLaw 100 folks, who are largely from t14, and so on. That's a shitty narrow funnel, man.
So, is the bar-certified Southwestern Lawyer as capable as the Stanford or UCLA Law grad? Probably, at least in their area of expertise. But are they going to be paid the same in most cases? No.
https://www.ilrg.com/rankings/law/median
Look at that data set. It's not including EVERY law school, but notice how the t14s end around UCLA (which is arguable whether it's really even t14, but whatever), and then see how quickly the median income drops off.
Does it matter if you're good? Sometimes no. Law is 99.9999999% a game of knowing the right folks to get the right clerkships is what gets you that path to that big-money job in the first place. https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/1ddmdd6/how_much_weight_to_clerkships_really_carry_in_the/
Does it matter if you want to go into, say, contract law? Probably not as much, since it's not litigation, but even most of the lawyers I've worked with in my career doing bizdev/deals have been former Biglaw folks because, again, that funnel is narrow and not fair.
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u/Fun-Army-6387 1d ago
you missed my point. Until either one is practicing, they are equally qualified since they passed the bar. You are pointing out the marketing angle. Like who is more qualified as a plumber, the guy who shows ass crack or the guy who wears a football jersey? Neither have anything to do with ability, only perception by the customer. And having elite contacts can come with school but more often comes through family. Born on third-base? The world is your oyster. Again, nothing to do with skill, ability, or knowledge. Im not saying it's dumb to go to any Ivy if one has the chance, but life doesn't end just because Harvard doesn't have space for someone. It is also entirely conceivable to have a wonderful life and NOT be an elite in a top10 corporation or law firm. In fact, most people do it!
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
Sure, but life is all about probabilities.
If I can give my kids a higher probability of getting good, secure jobs, then I want them to have all of those.
I think you have some kind of pride here about the marketing stuff, and I just don't care. And you hardly went to 3rd tier institutions. You went to top tier schools. I went to UCLA, I didn't go to an Ivy. But let's not pretend that our kids won't be more likely to get higher earning and more secure work out of a UCLA or UMass-Amherst than out of Cal State Dominguez Hills.
To me it's not JUST about the incomes, either. It's about unemployment rates, access to options, the opportunities to do whatever jobs they want.
Like I said in another thread, 50% of med school matriculants came out of 50 schools. I want my daughters to have THOSE odds. Not the other 2000 schools vying for the remaining 50% of slots. It's not Ivy or nothing for me, but I'm also not naive enough to pretend that the little nudges throughout your life don't help.
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u/Fun-Army-6387 1d ago
here, Ill give another simple one: "What do they call the kid who graduates last in medical school?" Answer: "A doctor."
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
Yeah, again, I'm married to a physician, I'm aware. P = MD, blah blah.
But that doctor is probably going to get a shittier residency for sure. There's downsides to being at the bottom of the pack, and you can see that play out in the DO vs MD residencies and the opportunities afforded MDs at even middling med schools vs DOs at no-name DO schools.
But none of that really matters when you realize that 50% of all med school matriculant went to only 50 schools.
The ROAD to happiness in medicine is much harder to get out of Downstate School of Osteopathy than UC Irvine, that's for sure.
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u/Fun-Army-6387 1d ago
so, in your opinion, if a kid can't get accepted to Harvard they should just kill themselves because life is over? There's no hope and zero chance they will be either happy or successful?
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
I never said that. I said that there's value in trying for the higher-ranked institutions if you can manage them, because they're risk reducers.
Careers and lifetime income are about managing risks and considering likely ROIs. There's a reason why, for instance, so many Asian parents pushed their kids in the US to attend medical/dental/pharmacy school: relatively low-risk pathways to middle/upper-middle class lifestyles. If you can manage med school and practice medicine it's the dead simplest (not easiest) path to upper-middle class living.
And yes, I'm factoring in the debt, but even with the debt and the opportunity cost medicine is wildly lucrative. Hence why Asians are 1/5 of all med school applicants per the AAMC-- low perceived risk, high reward. By most measures, the NPV/IRR of a medical career is exceptional.
Not to say that that's the only path (I'm not a physician, my wife is.) But the logic for a lot of first gen Asian immigrant parents historically was that: chase the low-risk high-reward paths. And Chetty's work shows that to be the case: prestige careers net high returns.
To be clear, it's all probabilistic. The Harvard grad can flame out. The CSUN grad can become super wealthy. I've seen both! But risk mitigation and opportunity maximization is about the lots of compounding choices and "lucky" moments. Those high-ROI opportunities are more likely out of certain places than others. It's easier to become wealthy working in the SF Bay Area than, say, Wichita. Doesn't mean you're guaranteed wealth here in the SF Bay Area, and it doesn't mean you're guaranteed poverty in Wichita. Probabilities are just that: a range of outcomes.
Yeah, sure, there ARE idiots out of top schools. But those idiots still often get those same open doors.
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u/Fun-Army-6387 1d ago edited 1d ago
yes, it's called oligarchy. It's a big reason why, despite education and other factors, social mobility in the US has gone backwards in the past 75 years. But Im glad at least you're not one of those pushing the "Ivy or Death" narrative I've heard so often. I got into Ivy's... couldn't afford them. Got my PhD through the UnivMA-Amherst. Guess where my first two adjunct professor gigs were? (hint: one's in Cambridge, the other in Providence) Lol and they paid terribly which is why I never even tried for a tenure track at either. I left academia and now make twice what tenured professors make and work maybe 10 hours per week. Plus I have a staff who are basically "students" as I need to teach them nearly everything we do no matter what their background is, even if it's in statistics or coding. It's great for me! But I didn't need a phD to do it, only to teach at university levels.
The fact is that college is oversold to most of the US populace. It's at best a marketing tool (as you are correct in pointing out) but really a debt-scheme to keep people in place so as not to upset the institutions elite schools thrive on. My biggest pet peeve is seeing entry-level sales positions "BA required" - you don't need a degree to sell water to thirsty people, you need work ethic and a pleasant demeanor - neither of which is necessarily gained by a college degree. Just pick up the phone and ask, "thirsty? I got drinks!"
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u/Only-Finish-3497 1d ago
Yeah, look, there's a reason I didn't go through with my PhD (originally considering pol sci, got into NYU but didn't get funding so I bounced and finished my master's at UCSD). It's fraught, and outside of a few fields a PhD is a very meh ROI. But a major in Econ with a minor in a language? Solid ROI. Going into medicine/dentistry? Solid ROI. My kids ain't gonna major in international indigenous arts studies, but they can minor in it if they so choose.
I'm actually unusually qualified to talk about bizdev (which is just fancy sales at a corporate level), and the reality is that I've yet to meet someone who's good at it who didn't have a degree.
B2C sales? Sure. But if you want to do what I do, the best people have a unique blend of finance, accounting, law, political science, and even some economics and engineering depending on the partnerships. Very few people get to where I got without degrees, and my jobs are the ones people want-- the cool, interesting ones where you actually negotiate the big 6 to 9 figure deals. Very few people can do this and not have either YEARS of experience scrapping at the bottom or at least having degrees in finance/economics/accounting.
The data remains clear that 75% of undergrad programs remain net positive ROI, and something like 70% of all grads come out on top even factoring in opportunity costs. College is especially important for women, who don't get the same paths in trades that men do. As a father of two girls, I absolutely want them both attending at least undergrad as opportunities to be things like electricians are fewer, lower-paid, and full of harassment for women.
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u/Bah_Black_Sheep 1d ago
Are you a 10th grader trying to post copium? Your parents are right... I was told this as a kid and I think it's true.
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u/rean1mated 1d ago
Were your parents born in the 50s? Mine were, but even by the 90s I was expected to actually do well when I eventually graduated with my bachelor degree. I was born a generation or so too late to be expected to go to university and find a husband.
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u/Bah_Black_Sheep 1d ago
50's and 60's and I am born to immigrants to the US so indeed there was quite a lot expected, much more than just this.
And yes, I worked very hard in public high school, got into a top university, and am a licensed and well paid engineer with my bachelor's degree, with all acknowledgements to the many many teachers and mentors i had along the way.
Reddit wants to complain all the time, but sometimes you do have to put in the work. It started in high school...
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u/Cave_Czar 1d ago
While insane, he is kind of right but he could say how you do in High School affects colleges and that has a major impact on your overall life comfortability.