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<p>I don’t mean mediocre academic stats. I just don’t mean tippiest of the top.</p>
<p>At the risk of turning this into a specific debate on these two schools, which I don’t intend, there was a poster choosing between Wellesley and Northwestern. I jokingly mentioned that I solved that problem by sending a twin to each. The poster asked about prestige. Another poster said that she felt Wellesley had more prestige than NU (or maybe NU doesn’t have as much prestige as Wellesley, don’t recall how she worded it, but that was the gist) - though she clearly felt they were both excellent schools, so it wasn’t a function of dissing either school. Someone else then jumped in with a comparison of the stats of the two (in which NU does better). </p>
<p>I thought it was an interesting comparison of how some were looking at prestige through the lens of sheer academics (as measured by stats, selectivity, etc.) and finding NU > W, whereas others were looking at prestige through a lens of “that’s where the high-class people historically went” in which case W (and many of the Seven Sisters) > NU. These two maybe aren’t the best examples since W is rated so high in its own category … perhaps a better example might be a Bryn Mawr or Mt Holyoke versus a Northwestern, where it’s just different kinds of prestige among different circles IMO.</p>
<p>I really don’t want to set off a debate on these specific schools, though. It’s more the general concept.</p>