Ivy League Failures: Anybody know of people who got fancy education but ended up as nobody?

The brojos.

My sister. Bachelors and masters at Ivy. Worked for one year in the admissions office and a half a year in her field. Stay at home mom for two girls all the way through high school (one had special needs, but it really became an excuse to sit around the house). Kids are now in college and she makes costumes for the local high school theater group. She is actually pretty good at it and has been approached by the professional theater companies in town about openings they had. But she won't do it because she doesn't want to have to work for someone. HS group pays her about $25k a year. Husband is a doctor and pays all the bills.

Ivy is definitely a pedigree and not anything substantive. There is an "education advocate" in our area who is an Ivy educated undergrad and attorney (Columbia law). She goes around writing articles for the paper about how all the public school programs are discriminatory and gets everyone freaked out that the school system is going to get sued. Whenever she is pressed on what needs to be done to fix things, she just goes into a spasm of adjectives ("collaborative", "inclusive", etc.) and cannot come up with a single policy proposal. She ran for school board and came in last despite having the endorsement of the local paper. She could not keep a job at a law firm for much more than 2 years.

lol yea the two guys who started the site

True, we were only offering a one-year position with no possibility of renewal and he made it clear that he wanted the job. I agree that academic insecurity likely plays a role in the downfall of many eminently qualified candidates. In some cases I think they've got a short shelf life, a couple of seasons on the job market and if they don't land their ideal job immediately, they may end up off the beaten path, overlooked in favor of newer PhDs. For a while around 2000, when the academic job market was bad, but nowhere near as catastrophic as it is now, a lot of mid-range schools might pass over the Ivy League-trained candidates assuming that they wouldn't stay. Why hire Joe Smith, Brown PhD, at the Midwestern liberal arts school, if he's only going to stay the two or three years it takes to get his diss published as a monograph and then move to a school whose pedigree better matches his own? So Joe Smith gets fewer interviews than the PhDs from good state schools; the competition for his ideal job is fierce and he doesn't have his book contract yet so he's stuck adjuncting. By the time his book is done and under contract he's been off the tenure-track road for a bit and people question why when he applies again. It's a stupid approach, fuelled in part by the insecurity of hiring committees deciding not to interview someone essentially because they believe they themselves aren't good enough for the Ivy PhD candidate.

Contract1 wrote:

Thinkster wrote:

Taught for a decade at a somewhat selective liberal arts college in the midwest. Our department was looking to fill a one-year visiting assistant position and one of the applicants was AB Harvard, DPhil Oxford--on a Rhodes Scholarship. Nice guy who'd bounced around since Oxford, in increasingly short stints at various positions. Nobody could quite figure out what the issue was and we decided not to hire him for fear of what baggage he might be carrying.

You only offered a short stint yourself, think typical academic insecurity/contract lengths might have been part of the problem here?!

sbeefyk2 wrote:

Notice the Ivy Leaguers who amounted to nothing got worthless liberal arts or humanities degrees.

I had a high school friend who went to Harvard on an academic scholarship, graduated with a degree in physics and went onto for Ph.D. and post doc in one of the top departments in the country. And breezed through those. But he couldn't find an academic or research position. His spouse did get a high level research position so he followed her, does a little bit of side business in an unrelated field and has had a tough time of it.

Similarly, had a college classmate in the same field who was a Rhodes Scholar nominee, maybe one B in his entire life. Got a masters at an Ivy school, worked for a major science publication for several years and went on to earn a PhD at the best school in the country for his specialty. Was considered brilliant by his colleagues, got his degree, and couldn't find a job. Ended up divorced and then dead from suicide.

And one more, with a happier ending. Friend got a math-physics degree from a top research university (same prestige as any of the Ivys), doctorate from a top research institution, and went on to work several post docs, but hung it up after not being able to score a job. Became a college coach and by all indications has done well with that.

So beefy, you don't know diddly. And what are your PRs and degrees?

About the only way I would have gotten to an Ivy league school would to have been on the grounds crew cutting the lawn and trimming the hedges. That being said I always figured most of the high dollar schools were high dollar simply to keep wealthy people's children from interacting with poor and middle class kids.

College is where a lot of people meet and marry, if you come from old money it would make sense to keep your daughter from meeting some dude with two HS teachers as parents, falling in love and if things are really bad birthing his kids.

My brother. Dartmouth BA, masters international relations, JD, fluent Chinese and French. But crippling mental illness then bankruptcy from student loans, failed the bar 8 times. Now lives at home w/ mom, drives for a taxi service.

True story.

Good topic.

Sister was a great high school student (at a low-performing school) and went to Harvard - cost her and my parents a ton of money.

Started as Bio major - changed to 'History of Science' - fake-o Harvard major.

Then changed major to plain old History.

Graduated and now teaches high school. Not a 'failure', but could be in the same

current position after going to state school for free.

Bottom line: You may think you are smart in high school, but top colleges are an entirely different beast altogether

and may demoralize you and keep you from reaching your potential...

If you're not truly the 'best' or not willing to put in the work, you will be more successful going to state school than

to an Ivy.

Contrasting example: Wife was a mediocre high school student at a good school. Went to state school, then to med

school, then to top training programs. State school success set her up for the future.

Have these folks simply been so educated in a specialty area that there is no job for them? Outside of college professor, what else were these folks trying to do?

I have always thought that a person that can handle that type of educational load could be successful at just about anything, like your 3rd example. I guess some just cannot adapt to a a new game plan when the original plan falls through.

Yes pretty specialized but physics and math appear to be like that. I'm sure they could have found a good job in applied science or industry but not the types to compromise on principle. First two were pretty anal about things, especially the first example. Everything had to be just so. The coach had running and coaching as an outlet.

Old Polar Bear - what law school did your brother attend? At the so-called top 10 law school I attended, whatever the limitations of the students, and well, they were legion, the bar pass rates for those not admitted under an affirmative action program (touchy subject then and is now) were in the high 90's in term of percentage of first time bar applicants. I would think your brother went to one of these schools - many of my classmates had his kind of pedigree. And not passing the bar 8 times - there has to be a mental health or impairment issue that existed well before law school. I know hindsight is unfair, but law school is one of the worst endeavors for someone with mental health challenges. This seems like an extreme case.

Some of the commentary in this thread reeks of jealousy..

I sense that a lot of people in this thread lacked the intellect to make it to these institutions...

I went to a state school, got job at age 21 - made $100K/year by the time I was 26

Now I am attending ivy league MBA program and will make $175K when I graduate in next year or so.

It takes a combination of intelligence and hard work to "make it" these days. I see Ivy league schools as a great place to hone your intellect by being around incredibly smart people 24/7/365.

However, the intellect will only take you so far - you must work hard and have "grit" to make it in the real world. Most academic types lack that element

People seem to be largely conflating the impact of the unique challenges of the academic job market with the impact of educational pedigree on career outcomes. People are also conflating undergraduate degrees, professional degrees, and graduate degrees, as well as university vs. department level prestige. There are significant differences.

Some career paths are more challenging then others. My wife is an academic, and I can tell you it is amongst the most difficult fields to enter. Tenure track academic positions are as rare as hens teeth. The great majority of growth, and therefor hiring, in the field happened in the '70s and '80s. As these tend to be lifetime positions, they rarely open up, and there is very little hiring today. These days a PhD from a prestigious program is simply table stakes for even being considered. In any given discipline, having a degree from outside of the top 5-10 programs (measured at the department level, not the university level), will essentially eliminate you from consideration. I challenge you to find more than a handful of tenured professors, hired in the past couple of decades who don't have a PhD from the "Ivy League" of their discipline (with Ivy League used as a generic replacement for best, not to indicate the actual Ivy League which is only applies to undergraduate degrees). My wife's department was the #2 ranked program in her discipline, and even from that department less than 30% of the graduates in her class landed a tenure track position. The great, great majority of PhDs will be unable to secure a career as an academic. An "Ivy League" PhD is very much the average in that pool of job seekers. Unfortunately, outside academia and a few other small niches (e.g. pharma research) a PhD carries little weight in the job market.

Outside of academia, a prestigious degree is generally a major advantage in selective career fields. If you survey the new hires at any major investment bank, management consulting firm, or private equity fund you'll find a great majority of them have prestigious degrees (my understanding is this also largely applies to tech, but I have no direct experience). Most of this hiring happens at the undergraduate level, so its university level pedigree that matters (i.e. any degree from Harvard is an advantage over any degree from U Mich). Hiring at the professional/graduate degree level is less frequent and more closely aligned with department than university prestige (i.e. a MBA from U Mich is far more valuable than a MPhil from Harvard), but university prestige still matters (i.e. an MBA from Harvard has an advantage over one from Columbia). Law firms are notoriously picky regarding academic pedigree to the extent that it is pretty well known that it is a bad idea to attend a law school outside of the top 14 (not sure why 14 is the cutoff, but its a thing).

Of course, the great majority of career paths are not selective (probably greater than 90% of all careers). Any relevant degree will do, and the ability to construct and maintain personal networks is far more important. For example, if you want to be a real estate broker, your degree will be far less relevant to your success than your ability to market yourself and get to know people within your community. For these types of careers a prestigious degree is largely wasted when it comes to enhancing your career success solely via the degrees pedigree (I'm not going to argue the potential impact of differences in quality of education).

Finally, since in the great majority of careers educational pedigree matters very little, you'll find very many people with pedigreed educations in careers that do not require them. That doesn't mean the degrees aren't valuable for entering selective fields, it simply means the great majority of people do not enter a selective field.

query what happened wrote:

Old Polar Bear - what law school did your brother attend? At the so-called top 10 law school I attended, whatever the limitations of the students, and well, they were legion, the bar pass rates for those not admitted under an affirmative action program (touchy subject then and is now) were in the high 90's in term of percentage of first time bar applicants. I would think your brother went to one of these schools - many of my classmates had his kind of pedigree. And not passing the bar 8 times - there has to be a mental health or impairment issue that existed well before law school. I know hindsight is unfair, but law school is one of the worst endeavors for someone with mental health challenges. This seems like an extreme case.

BU law and, yeah, the mental health issues pre dated law school. I guess we figured if he found a spot for himself in the professional world, it would all work out.

Wasn't the case.

In the same post you:

1. Called posters dumb for not being able to get into an Ivy League school.

2. Congratulated yourself for getting into an 'Ivy league MBA program' - word of advice: if it's not Harvard or Penn, then it's no better than any non-ivy MBA program

3. Criticized ivy league academics for lacking 'grit' and hard work

Conclusion: you're the best! Congrats!

I am not surprised to hear about so many failures. The Ivies have no diversity. Everyone is of the same mindset so there is no expanding of thought.

random nobody wrote:

I guess I should be more specific. A person in my family has a very fancy education with 2 advanced degrees from an Ivy, but she has resorted to alcoholism and quit multiple jobs as a result. She now lives with her parents and can barely attend an AA meeting.

instead of helping her through hard times (times that could lead to her death), you are anonymously belittling her on a running forum.

you're a piece of sh*t

profound nobody wrote:

es that could lead to her death), you are anonymously belittling her on a running forum.

you're a piece of sh*t

The operative word here is anonymous - both she and I. Are you ok, Phineas?

profound nobody wrote:

random nobody wrote:

I guess I should be more specific. A person in my family has a very fancy education with 2 advanced degrees from an Ivy, but she has resorted to alcoholism and quit multiple jobs as a result. She now lives with her parents and can barely attend an AA meeting.

instead of helping her through hard times (times that could lead to her death), you are anonymously belittling her on a running forum.

you're a piece of sh*t

The OP didn't belittle anybody and didn't use names. I'd echo the question: Are you okay, boo? I'm asking genuinely.