How Important Is Your Undergraduate Degree Brand?
How Important Is Your Undergraduate Degree Brand?
Harvard. MIT. Yale. All brand names associated with top quality, top price education, and rightfully so as these institutions repeatedly churn out outstanding graduates (along with a ton of average ones, and a few substandard ones, like any school). That said, as colleges make decisions about who to admit, I’d like to throw out a controversial point of view:
The “brand” of your undergraduate degree is largely irrelevant in today’s marketplace.
Where you go to college is much, much less important to me as a hiring manager and as an executive than what you did while you were in college. Quick backstory - when I was 16, a junior in high school, I was looking around at what colleges I could go to. My parents took me on the summer road trip to visit a bunch of schools, and I submitted applications all over the place. I was admitted into about 80% of the schools I applied to, including Johns Hopkins, RPI, Cornell, and a few others.
In the end, I chose a small liberal arts college not too many people had heard of, Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. What made me turn my back on the “brand name” prestigious schools that had gladly admitted me?
Two things made F&M win out over any other school back then (this was 1993, mind you):
1. Air conditioning in the dorms. I’m a wimp when it comes to heat.
2. Computer networks in the dorms. At most schools at the time, even prominent schools like RPI and MIT, networked dorms were simply not a reality. F&M had made the investment in information technology, and it won the day.
These two things fit my personality and what I wanted to get out of college more than all the brand prestige ever could, and looking back, I wouldn’t change my decision a bit. The experiences I had in college at F&M could not be replicated at another school.
I graduated from F&M in 1997 with a Bachelor’s in Political Science & Government. The degree is largely unused, and has been since the moment Pomp & Circumstance faded from Hartman Green. I immediately took a job in information technology (there was no IT major in college, just computer science) at Sony Electronics, and my studies in political science, as well as the brand of my degree, have been ignored ever since.
What made F&M valuable was not the degree or the brand, but the experiences I had on campus. At F&M, I worked in the theater and took a course in television production, took courses in Islam and Japanese, and generally accumulated different ways to think, for myself and how other people thought.
The point of all this? If you’re choosing a school because it’s the “brand name” school, I urge you to carefully consider whether it’s the best school for YOU, for your personality, for what interests you, and for who you want to become. A lot of the brand name schools tout as a reason to attend their vast alumni networks, and I don’t doubt those networks have value.
Looking at my LinkedIn profile and my Twitter followers, I think my personal network dwarfs the access that the average college graduate has, even from a brand name school. The beauty of new social networks means that no matter what school you go to - or if you never went to college at all - you can still create a powerful network that rivals schools covered in Ivy. That argument, then, that only at a brand name school will you get access to a coveted network, rings false.
Choose the college or university that fits who you are and FEELS good when you visit. Spend a day or two if you can, read the school newspaper, check out the students on Facebook, MySpace, etc. and then make a decision.
A final thought. Your school’s brand, whatever school you choose, is influenced by its graduates. If you are a superstar, when you matriculate with a bachelor’s degree from a brand name school, you’ll be just another addition to their rolls of distinguished alumni. If you matriculate from a smaller, less well known school and make a real splash, you’ll have dramatically more impact on the school and its reputation.
How important is the brand of your undergraduate degree? Utterly irrelevant, especially in a day and age when college graduates in the workforce are a dime a dozen. What you LEARN and DO in college is far more important than where you WENT - and as a hiring manager, I will be looking for what you’ve accomplished and what you can do to make my company better.
Quiz question: how many people in my social media networks had heard of Franklin & Marshall College prior to reading this blog post? Poll below.
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Chris, I agree with the vast majority of your comments. Your school experience is what you make of it. Do good work and you can succeed anywhere. However, I think you’re discounting a couple of things: one, if it says MIT Yale, etc. on your resume, people take notice. Two, when you go to places like MIT, Yale, you get to network with people who will be future leaders of the world. LinkedIn is all fine and good, but it’s no replacement for living next to a future Fed chairman for two years. There are reasons that business communities have assembled in the immediate area of Harvard/MIT and UC-Berklee/Stanford.
I agree that you shouldn’t attend a school just because of its name. Just as you shouldn’t pick a school based solely on how swank the dorms are. But remember, the top tier schools are where they are for a reason.
I chose a top 20 state school, and it was four of the best years of my life, for a reasonable price. Made some life long friends and met my (then to-be) wife. I had no idea what I wanted out of life then, and it was a big enough place to give me options. Now I am working successfully in the real world, and doing grad school at night (another state school). The person in the next office over went to Brown, and on the other side, that person doesn’t have a college degree at all. One is the VP, the other is the CEO. I’m not telling who is who. So life is what you make out of your opportunities.
April 4th, 2008 | #
I went to an Ivy for an undergrad degree, and a non brand name law school. I think for high school seniors, four years at a residential college rather than commuting, is an important experience in safely learning independence, time management skills, and some grown-up lessons about getting along with others, besides family (room-mates teach you this pretty quickly).
These life skills translate into the workplace and to life, by teaching you to pay rent on time, manage you work when no one’s looking over your shoulder, taking care of laundry, meals, etc. on your own. sure, you may still be eating the meal plan, but you take care of getting yourself fed regularly- transition to the real world is not such a shock when meals are no longer available on demand… In the workplace, you have to essentially live with a variety of people, some of whom you might not even like very well, but still have to learn to get along and work productively together- not all that much different from dealing with a cantankerous roommate in college.
I met a lot of really smart people while at Penn, and some people who clearly have not set the world afire. This begs the question at the heart of this debate, which is how do we measure life success?
Some people see getting into a brand name school as one of these chips or tokens of success; I fully believe that success is much more accurately measured by going to a college that meets your interests and needs, where you fit in and feel successful. This might even mean transferring to another school that is a better fit, if the first one is not such a good match.
There is no one path to later job success or life success. The skills you learn in college are just as important as your major. I majored in biology but ended up in law school, yet skills I learned in both of these areas have helped me become who I am today. I can read detailed medical research articles, case law, contracts or novels with equal levels of understanding (if not enjoyment) and those are life skills that make managing almost anything as an adult easier than had I not had these experiences. So I am not the least bit sorry for any choice I made.
You have to look at college as one step along life’s path, not the only step in one direction with no chance to choose again. If there’s anything we’re learning, it’s that people have many jobs over their lifespan, and not always the job they thought they’d have when applying for college. so choose a school based on your itnerests, explore new ones, and don’t get too hung up on brand names or anything else. The experience is what you make of it.
April 7th, 2008 | #