What You Do vs. Where You Go

During the fall months at high school guidance counseling programs, juniors run to the stage to participate in an exercise to try and help them understand that it is not “where you go” that matters. They hold posters featuring the names and faces of famous people while their peers and parents shout out with confidence the names of elite colleges they assume the celebrities attended.

The “oohs” and “aahs” follow as the audience learns that Steven Spielberg, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates dropped out of college, that Oprah Winfrey is an alumna of Tennessee State and that Ken Burns graduated from Hampshire College. If even a few stressed students and their anxious parents benefit from this information, it is a worthwhile exercise.

Even better is giving the students an assignment to identify the happy, successful people in their own circle of family, friends, co-workers and neighbors and challenging them to go and ask “if or where they went to college?” as a means of broadening the conversation in their search for a life after high school.

The key to success in college and beyond has more to do with what students do with their time during college than where they choose to attend. A long-term study of 6,335 college graduates published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that graduating from a college where entering students have higher SAT scores -- one marker of elite colleges -- didn't pay off in higher post-graduation income. Researchers found that students who applied to several elite schools but didn't attend them -- either because of rejection or by their own choice -- are more likely to earn high incomes later than students who actually attended elite schools.

In a summary of the findings, the bureau says that "evidently, students' motivation, ambition and desire to learn have a much stronger effect on their subsequent success than average academic ability of their classmates.”

The late author Loren Pope, who wrote "Looking Beyond the Ivy League" and "Colleges That Change Lives," noted that the greater the opportunity for engagement and critical, creative and collaborative learning with faculty, peers and community, the more likely the chance for future success.

Just ask Ken Burns.