Poll: Prestigious Colleges Won't Make You Happier In Life Or Work
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/05/06/308382912/poll-prestigious-colleges-wont-make-you-happier-in-life-or-workThere's plenty of anxiety in the U.S. over getting into a top college. But a suggests that, later in life, it doesn't matter nearly as much as we think. In fact, when you ask college graduates whether they're "engaged" with their work or "thriving" in all aspects of their lives, their responses don't vary one bit whether they went to a prestigious college or not.
The surprising findings come in a survey of 29,650 college graduates of all ages by Gallup pollsters working with researchers at Purdue University. The poll asked graduates a range of questions designed to measure how well they are doing in life across factors such as income and "engagement" in their jobs and careers.
The survey set a high bar. It found that 39 percent of college grads overall say they're "engaged" at work (which is ). And, while almost 5 in 6 self-report doing great in at least one sphere — whether sense of purpose, financial security, physical health, close relationships or community pride — only 11 percent are "thriving" in all five areas of well-being.
And here's the kicker.
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After that, the name doesn't much matter.
What happens, though, is that Ivy League schools typically have more competent grads. They have better admits, the admits make better students, and when they graduate they've learned more. The "
academically) rich get richer" and the academically poor, by comparison, get poorer.
The school name is indexical to student and graduate quality, by and large. If Harvard started to turn out academic slugs that couldn't write a coherent sentence Harvard's rep would drop over the course of a decade.
Some grads from top ranked schools are dolts and flop. Some grads or even drop-outs from bottom-ranked schools are brilliant and, if they get their foot in the door, do well. A small number of counterexamples test a generalization's accuracy (aka "the exception proves the rule"
but don't disprove the generalization. It's scary that GPA and school ranking are largely predictive of career and income; that metrics for admits (GPA and SAT/ACT) are largely predictive of graduation GPA; that middle school metrics are largely predictive of college attendance and choice. When you do all the math, you get nearly 50% accuracy if you look at a kid in 6th grade. Considering the range of possibilities, that's really scary. Even if it does follow quite reasonably.
Above a certain minimum level of income and education, a lot of things don't matter. What matters after that is finding a way to not stress out because others are doing better than you or have more than you, or drawing satisfaction because others are doing worse (there's a symmetry there, and it's not a good one). Measures of perceived stress show that upper middle class and poor teenagers have the same levels of stress. Single, relatively poor mothers and two-parent middle-class mothers are equally happy. You adjust your "sensors" to yield about the same results given radically different inputs.
