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No One Cares What School You Went To
Nowadays the biggest lie is that the place you graduated from matters, it doesn’t.
“I honestly haven’t found anybody that cares about where I went to school.”
This might sound hard to believe, but no one cares that you went to that great college or university that has left you in thousands of dollars in debt. I know, you feel like you spent all those years at *insert school here* so it would mean something, but it doesn’t. No one cares.
You know what people do care about, your production level at your job. What you are able to bring to the table at the job you were hired to do. The majority of people doing the hiring are looking at what you can do for them, not that you went to that great school.
The Wall Street Journal did a profile a few months back on how Baylor University steered low-income parents into debt that they couldn’t afford. The reason so many of these parents ended up going into debt was because they wanted their kids to go to a great university instead of a community college. The parents felt like it was better to start at a university like Baylor, rather than transfer thereafter taking the lower-cost route of community college.
Why did so many parents think it was imperative to do this? The old-school belief that where you go to school matters. Yes, if you went to Harvard and were applying to law school, or looking for that great Wall Street job, that will help you. If you are applying for a lot of other things, an Ivy League school will look great, but what about the rest of us that couldn’t get into Harvard or Yale? What does that local state school degree mean? It means something, but it doesn’t mean you need to incur an extraordinary amount of debt to get it.
Let’s look at the numbers from the mentioned article. One of the people profiled Trina Saverin amassed over $200,000 in student loan debt by taking out loans using Parent Plus loans. These are loans that a parent can take out to support their student. Ms. Saverin took out $65,000 for her daughter, then another $74,000 for her, and the rest is money she owes for her own master’s degree. Leaving aside the debt she owes for her own degree. By her taking out…
