Oh you didn’t get into Harvard? Don’t waste your money going elsewhere.
April 28, 2006 by karen
Rich Karlgaard of Forbes magazine suggests if you are not earning a degree from Harvard, Yale or 20 of the other highly ranked private universities, you are probably poorly investing your money. While he makes a few valid points in this editorial (Google = Widener Library), in general this article enrages the hater of all things elitist in me.
Karlgaard predicts that parents who spend $100,000 to $175,000 on a four-year degree may achieve “a far greater return for themselves and their children in other asset classes.” Huh. Interesting. Maybe if they had the $100,000-$175,00 to start. Quite a few of the college graduates I know needed to borrow from their future before they were able to poorly invest in their education.
I get that his concern is financial, but isn’t there something to be said about the experience of going to college that you cannot obtain from investing in Yahoo or the brownstone down the block?
Tags: news
Posted in Uncategorized
April 28th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
soon they’re’ll be nothing left but drop-down menus
April 28th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
after finishing Columbia, my brother made a similar point, that he felt that he would have been better off going to UMass and saving 100k. And my mom has repeatedly told me that if i ever decide to get my MBA (unlikely), i should either go to a top 10 school or save my money. But my family is a little elitist when it comes to education…
i think the state school argument isn’t a bad one, actually. But I was lucky enough to live in a state where the state school was pretty good. I also think that for people who know exactly what they want to do, a private institution is definitely worth it. Did i really need to spend 120k at Penn in order to get an econ degree that i only use for fantasy baseball? no, probably not. I’m sure the umass econ dept would have served just as well. But if i hadn’t gone to penn, i never meet Frank Chiachiere, i never get the internship at Razorfish philly (back when it’s i-frontier), maybe i don’t get interested in the internet or design, and i end up somewhere else entirely, maybe a little richer, but also maybe dreadfully unhappy. So i wouldn’t change a thing, but i do understand the argument.