<p>Let's be honest; the real competition out there for Wall Street jobs isn't between Ivies and LACs but between arts & science graduates as a whole and the state university systems that can produce finance majors by the thousands. Just because you can look around and find more Indiana University grads at Citibank than Wesleyan or Bowdoin doesn't necessarily mean anything except that the Indiana grads had to crawl over the bodies of a lot more of their classmates to get there. There will always be a demand for polished, well-spoken people who can write and present data well; and Wall Street knows they can find them at LACs.</p>
<p>Also, Ivy_Grad, if you really want to rely on anecdotal evidence, there's plenty to suggest that because of the self-selection process that you would encourage, the classroom atmospheres at many of the second-tier Ivies have become intellectually barren places, full of future titans waiting to stride the earth; where nothing counts but grades and graduation; where the professors have to stand on their heads to get anyone to participate in class discussion. I don't care what the future pay-off may look like, it can't be worth four years of boring classes with even more boring people.</p>
<p>Actually, assuming the cynical view that you have of the lower ivies were fact, students would still participate actively in class for the sake of recommendations, if nothing else</p>
<p>but if the Ivy schools are intellectually barren places, I wonder about every other school in the country as well.</p>
I vote for this option ... and along the way educate yourself. I'd suggest creating a spreadsheet to show the strengths and weknesses of each shool. Each row is a school. Each column has some info about the school ... location, size, rural/city, your major (Y/N), average SAT scores, % accepted, yield rate, Princeton Review academic quality index, Princeton Review quality of student life index, grad school admission rates, % of grads getting PhDs, etc. Include all the schools your parents are thinking about ... include all the schools you are interested in ... those terrifc LACs you are interested in ... and the LACs will be right up there with the schools your Dad is thinking about. </p>
<p>Next step, go look at schools ... the feel of a LAC in a collee town will be totally different than a research school in a big city ... which feels right to you? Hopefully, understanding you are picking from among the best schools in the US your parents will support whichever choice feels right to you.</p>
<p>I agree that LACs are as good if not better than big universities. What I argue is Alexandre's sentiment that Bowdoin/ Wesleyan/ etc are as good as places like Brown. Amherst/ Swarthmore/ Williams are absolutely on par, but Bowdoin, Wesleyan are a drop in terms of academics, placement, and student body.</p>
<p>you know, most people don't think, analyze, or care so much about where someone goes/went college as much as people on this board do.</p>
<p>if they did, then we could just all go to harvard and call it a day. we wouldn't have to work hard, have a personality, be interesting or anything else.</p>
<p>come on, life is about more than college rankings or prestige.</p>
<p>If you've read my previous posts on this board, you'd realize that I am quite cynical about college education today. The universities have abandoned the pursuit of truth entirely. Knowing historical facts for instance isn't considered as important to a college education as knowing ideas created yesterday.</p>
<p>Everyone is trying to find the "easy" way out. Thinking like "if I can go to Harvard, or Yale then I'll be set for the rest of my life." The unfortunate news flash is that it isn't true.</p>
<p>NYU has become "better" over the past couple of years. Better meaning that more people are applying, people with higher SAT's and GPA's are applying. I think the school had more intellectuals when it was "worse." Unfortunately, students care more about grades than they do about learning something - an unfortunate trend especially for college professors.</p>
<p>I can't speak for Bowdoin, but, for Wesleyan, this has clearly been an extremely competitive admissions year; there is at least one person on the Wesleyan CC board who reports turning down Brown; another who has turned down Wharton. A private school dean in NYC reported earlier this year that "Wesleyan is as hard to get into as Yale" if you're from New York. Maybe there is a qualitative difference between it and Brown. I just haven't seen it.</p>
<p>I'm someone who could have gone to a more prestigious school but fell in love with (and found my niche at) a small, lesser-known liberal arts school. I guess this would have been a big strike against me if I was trying to get a job some places, but I wasn't that interested in that route. I did have a classmate go to a Wall Street firm, and one of our trustees regularly extended internship offers at her firm at Merrill Lynch Pierce Finney & Smith (just to demonstrate that's not unheard of) but not everyone wants that.</p>
<p>There are hundreds of thousands of college graduates from "lesser" places who had a great college experience and lead happy fulfilling lives afterward--with little convincing evidence (I've seen) that their lives would have been substantially better "if only" they'd gone somewhere more prestigious. </p>
<p>Sure, a great school opens doors. But you're not shooting your future in the foot if you follow your heart instead.</p>
<p>There is no way Wes is even close to as difficult to get into as Yale...except maybe from that ONE new york school. I'd say Wes is about the same difficulty as WUSTL.</p>
<p>Depends on the student on whether Wes is about the same as WUSTL. WUSTL appears to be a very difficult school to get into, especially if you don't have a top 10% class ranking and strong math SAT score.</p>
<p>Freshman Class Profile: Wesleyan - WUSTL - Yale</p>
<p>% ranked Top 10% 66% - 93% - 95%
Math SAT mid-range 650/740 - 690/780 - 690/790
Verbal SAT mid-range 660/750 - 660/740 - 690/790</p>
<p>but look at the stats for WUSTL literaelly 3-4 years ago, the sat average is about 100-120 pts lower. Therefore, either there is some cooking of the books or something. You can look at any ranking statistic, placement, and WUSTL does not do as well as any of its "peers."</p>
<p>I find this thread fascinating. Because of tenure, the actual education at any of these schools can't possibly change that much so schools pursue "top students" to make themselves look better in the US News rankings.</p>
<p>Personally, I resent this technique for the same reason I reject most rankings. No one should ever apply to the top 10, top 20, top 30 schools regardless of other factors. The education at Wesleyan, Washington University at St. Louis, or Yale hasn't changed that much over the last 10 years mostly because of tenure.</p>
<p>Don't assume that if the SAT scores and the GPA's improve, that the school necessarily improves or is a place you would like to be.</p>
<p>in april, i found myself choosing between vassar, brown, wesleyan, swarthmore, carleton, and oberlin. i visited all these places, talked to profs and students, sat in on classes, and did overnights, and i gotta say i found the students bodies, potential opportunities after college, resources, and academics pretty similar at all these places. sure, some schools were stronger in some departments than others, but overall they were pretty much the same. the main important differences were location, "feel and fit", and, for these schools, "quirkiness" factor. </p>
<p>the other differences were desirabilty and selectivity (give or take a few thousand applications, 30-40 points on the SAT here and there, the really useless class rank number), but do any of us really think we're going to be attending classes and pursuing activities while thinking to ourselves, "wow, this place is really selective; everyone wanted to come here"? I don't think so.</p>
<p>in fact, while all of these places had pretty serious student bodies, i found the least serious ones at the most desirable place. with the most celebrity children. lol. and the most serious students in the midwest. don't get me wrong, i loved all these places, and would've been happy to attend any one no matter how high on the prestige-o-meter they register.</p>
<p>Going back to the OP question, I do not really see how it could hurt applying to a more "prestigious" school that also includes things you want in a college in addition to those you are currently applying to (unless admissions fees are a problem). As others have posted before, Brown is similar to Wes and Dartmouth to Bowdoin, only they carry more "prestige" because they have the Ivy mystique and cull a slightly stronger student body.</p>
<p>On the other hand, Cornell and Georgetown are quite different from the schools you mentioned, and have essentially equivalent "prestige" and difficulty in admissions as Wes and Bowdoin, so they really aren't worth applying to, unless you visit and find that you prefer Cornell or Georgetown.</p>