Which is more globally recognized as a better school? Basically, if I took a trip to China and asked 30 different people which school they have heard of or which school they think is better, what would they say?
How will the answer you get be used?
Will it help dictate which school you apply to?
@jpm50 it is for my brother, he is deciding between BU and BC for applications and global recognition is an important factor for him. He wants to feel he can travel to anywhere in the world and have people know his school and for it to have a good reputation
Then your brother should go to Harvard or MIT.
BC is generally recognized as a better school in the U.S. Internationally, sorry I have no idea.
@TomSrOfBoston if only it was that simple
Both schools overall are similarly ranked. BC’s business school is ranked higher than BU’s, with especially strong finance and accounting departments. Both schools have many students from China so if you asked 30 Chinese people, I would imagine they would regard both schools as being good. Your brother should be more concerned with fit than with what someone else will think. If he’s that worried about what people around the world think, take Tom Sr.'s advice. If he’s not going to get in, let him go someplace where HE is happy, not worrying about the opinions of others.
These two schools are VERY different. Visit! I much prefer BC.
BC is more respected in USA
BU is more respected in world
@laurrodes:
The above input you got from @gobosox is so true.
You’ve been asking this same “How good is XYZ school’s reputation?” on various school sites all over CC.
If your brother doesn’t find a school that’s a fit for him, he’ll waste lots of time, waste big $$$, and will be unhappy for it.
Besides, more people you ask confuse the two than can distinguish between them 
So he should pick the one he likes better.
Dear laurrodes and Readers : This topic holds little value for a High School student looking to make a collegiate decision for a variety of reasons.
First, the student in question is six years away from facing the real world market. In that time, rankings can change - more specifically, departments can change. So, international recognition can change over that time. Why does international recognition outweigh the ability, for example, to obtain a significant internship domestically that could drive your charge to that first job out of school?
Second, why would the reputation of a domestic institution as seen through a prism held in China be any more or less valid than one held in the US itself, Canada, England, Germany, India, Japan, Australia, or any international site? Sampling small sets of localized individuals might work for a survey of voters in a localized mayoral election, but it is irrelevant when selecting a college.
Third, without specifying the specific course of study at a given university, it is virtually impossible to provide an answer to the “which is better” query. While you might be able to state that Harvard is superior to Podunk Community College, it is significantly less obvious - even highly unlikely - that Harvard would be better or worse than MIT across the board in all disciplines.
To be honest, I feel like responding on this topic is swinging at a pitch in the dirt. I can count on one finger (not even one hand) the number of siblings who post on College Confidential for their brother to gain additional information about the sibling’s educational prospects and college selection process. I am left to question why, if the subject were important to the brother, we do not hear directly from the source. Is the brother not taking ownership of his own selection process - which will certainly come through when he tries to answer “Why BC?” in his essays?
More important as @gobosox indicated is the “fit” for the individual. Majors can and will change for many students between their first day of college and receipt of that final diploma. A college education is a daily grind over four years - 168 hours per week, 30 weeks per year of eating, sleeping, and breathing your University - its courses, its students, your friends, your meals, your entertainment, your sleeping, and your laundry. Never once have I seen a student stop in the middle of their semester and ask, “I wonder how this course load would be viewed in China”.
Just so you all know, my brother isn’t solely basing his decision off of reputation. He has multiple different factored he is basing his school’s off of and this is just one of them. He asked me which school had the best reputation worldwide and I did not know the answer so I asked it on here for him. No need to lecture me on how my brother should be picking his schools or focusing on fit, he knows that is important too. It was just a simple question. @jpm50 @scottj
Actually, it’s not a simple question. Schools have different areas where they excel. Very few schools are good at everything. Not knowing what your brother wants to study makes this hard to answer. Though it’s good of you to help him out here, since he has the question, he can ask on this site just as easily as you can.
Odds are, they would not have heard of either school. However, BU probably has a higher international rep due to its engineering and med school, two priority items overseas. But better known, doesn’t make it “better”; indeed, BC is much better in the liberal arts, but that is something your 30 Chinese friends are unlikely to care much about.
@gobosox he wants to study business and doesn’t have an account on here and I already did so he just asked me to ask for him.
@bluebayou the Chinese thing was just an example. He doesn’t only care about the reputation in China. He cares about the school’s global reputations.
The undergraduate business school at BC is higher-ranked than at BU. Both, however, are good schools. Though the schools are only a few miles apart geographically, they are very different. Visits to both schools are recommended.
two things: even tho BC undergrad biz may be ranked higher than BU’s undergrad program, that is meaningless to international rep, which is 99% based on grad school prestige. (Neither Harvard nor Stanford, generally regarded as the top 2 biz programs, offer undergrad majors.)
second thing, but related: international prestige is generally viewed thru the lens of Research, so top STEM schools do very well; and is why some publics, like Berkeley and Michigan, rank much higher than many excellent privates. It is also why BC, which has a smaller grad program, is less well known than BU internationally.
@bluebayou Okay, but what really separates the undergraduate business school is the job placement statistics. According to Bloomberg, 90% of the undergraduate biz students have jobs by graduation at Boston College. At Boston University, only 39% of the undergraduate biz students have jobs by graduation, and after 3 months, these numbers increase to 52%. It is not until after 6 months of graduation that the undergraduate biz students have job placement similar to Boston College’s job placement by graduation.
kid: totally irrelevant, and that is/was my point. Rep derives from the Grad Programs; that’s all the internationals know and care about. Actually, the same is true in the US. So the fact that perhaps one undergrad school is better than the other in the narrow NE corridor, nationally – and internationally – they are considered similarly: fine, regional schools.
There are only a ~handful of undergrad biz programs that have national cache, and those are the usual suspects: Wharton, MIT-Sloan, Stern, Ross, Haas…all others are excellent regional schools.