I can't believe we are still discussing this. Elite jobs ( jobs with high pay potential ) require elite education i.e. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, Sorbone etc.. Otherwise why would anyone pay five, six, ten times the tuition to attend one of these elite universities when they can attend their local state universities for less i.e. there is a difference in quality of education and experience.
Slider: Goose, whose butt did you kiss to get in here anyway? Goose: The list is long, but distinguished.
"perceived value... and mostly the networking opportunities... i remember a few years back seeing that the average harvard MBA made like 98-102k per year after graduation... about the same as a nurse who works a bit of overtime... and even with that overtime will work less hours than the harvard MBA... for example in canada, mcgill university is ranked 18th in the WORLD, above several of our ivy league schools (brown, dartmouth cornell )... do you know what they pay to go to mcgill? about 3500/year.... as much as a shitty state schoo or jr collegel in the usa... while a name brand education never hurts, the path to riches lies not in a name brand education, but in entrepreneurship". quote by Mom0 / ph0x. You are forgetting quality of competition within the classroom or the university. If one were to get a job merely on connections they would shortly be stripped of it once they are unable to prove their worth. Remember all rankings are subjective. I do agree McGill is an 1st class university.
Beg somebody for an unpaid project. I'm not sure what kind of job you're looking for but as an example you approach a company that trades raw commodities worldwide and build a scheduling or project management spreadsheet with macros, pivot tables and vba code. And maybe link it up to an Access database which is also automated with VBA. You can learn the coding stuff from books at barnes and noble- it's not rocket science. If you had done stuff like this for the past year and a half , believe me, you'd be in demand right now (even if it was unpaid).
I really don't believe "companies that trade raw commodities worldwide" are facing a shortage of amateur programmers. Not to mention, real companies don't utilize MS Access databases or VBA. You must have forgotten what year it was, lol.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/business/economy/18grads.html?fta=y Maybe while people are at it they should look beyond the US.
obviously you don't know how they're running commodity derivatives RAD/Middle Office groups at places like Credit Suisse and Nomura. It's all excel/vba with some secondary DLL writing in C#.