Does Name Matter?

Ajit Vakharia

Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, but does going to a college such as these give students a better chance at being successful after their collegiate career compared to a student from any other university? According to Marilee Jones an admissions director at MIT, college name does not matter for future endeavors. A graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Jones says, “You can succeed by going to any school,” but she fails to show instances where students from non ivy league schools have done better than students from ivy league schools. The average starting salary for a Princeton University graduate is 65,000 dollars while the average starting salary for a Georgia Tech graduate is 58,900 dollars which is a substantial difference. Though many people will deny that going to a better school will give you better success after graduation, the truth is that the better the name, the more money graduates are making out of the school.

Students go to college to get the training they need to become successful members of the working field, and colleges with better names get them better careers. Does this mean all students that do not go to ivy league schools will have bad jobs? No. These are only statistics which can be broken. A graduate from a community college in North Dakota could go on the make millions of dollars a year from their career. As Jones brings up, “College is what a student makes it.” A graduate from Georgia Tech can have a 3.8 GPA with a lot of extracurriculars would more likely than not be picked over a Harvard graduate with 3.2 GPA and no extracurriculars applying for the same job. So name does matter, but does not mean students from not as popular schools cannot go on to be just as successful as a graduate from an ivy league.