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The Myth of the College Dropout

posted by mrpg on Friday April 21 2017, @06:16AM   
from the college-matters dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

In a recent study, we investigated how many of the wealthiest and most influential people graduated college. We studied 11,745 U.S. leaders, including CEOs, federal judges, politicians, multi-millionaires and billionaires, business leaders and the most globally powerful men and women.

We found about 94 percent of these U.S. leaders attended college, and about 50 percent attended an elite school. Though almost everyone went to college, elite school attendance varied widely. For instance, only 20.6 percent of House members and 33.8 percent of 30-millionaires attended an elite school, but over 80 percent of Forbes' most powerful people did. For whatever reason, about twice as many senators – 41 percent – as House members went to elite schools.

For comparison, based on census and college data, we estimate that only about 2 to 5 percent of all U.S. undergraduates went to one of the elite schools in our study. The people from our study attended elite schools at rates well above typical expectations.

Why waste $150,000 on an education you could get for $1.50 in late fees at the public library?

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Original Submission

• Re:It sure is a mystery! Re:It sure is a mystery! (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday April 21 2017, @02:13PM (1 child)

  by TheRaven (270) on Friday April 21 2017, @02:13PM (#497404) Journal

  Parental involvement is the only factor that has consistently been shown to improve performance. I went to a school not too dissimilar to the one that the grandparent describes. Around 5-10% of the top year were awarded places to Oxford or Cambridge each year. Not everyone there was wealthy (and no one was super wealthy - one son of a rich person was turned away because he insisted on security arrangements that the school thought would impact other students too much), and there was an assisted places scheme to cover the fees for people from poorer backgrounds. Pretty much everyone had supportive parents and you were expected to work at school, and if you didn't work and your parents didn't do anything to sort out the issues then you were expelled (this happened very rarely - I think to three people in my year over a 11 years).

  My godmother's children went to a state school, but in a prosperous middle class area and had quite a similar experience. Their school wasn't quite as well funded, but whenever they organised a fundraising event to make up the shortfall in government funding they'd have parents helping out and lots of cash flowing in. In contrast, state schools in poorer areas often have parents working such long hours that they can't support the students and with no disposable income to support the students.

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  sudo mod me up

  Parent

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• Re:It sure is a mystery! (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday April 21 2017, @02:36PM

  by kaszz (4211) on Friday April 21 2017, @02:36PM (#497417) Journal

  Isn't parental involvement actually exactly that. The virtue to study?

  Parent