Dumb question but here goes it:
which school has more prestige?
Chicago for sure imo. I always think of Chicago along with Columbia and Penn and Duke as the middle tier of elite schools below HYPSM. I always think of Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, (and Hopkins, Northwestern) as the bottom tier of elite schools. That is just my opinion though.
I think they’re pretty even overall in terms of rep. They certainly possess different strengths.
Academically Chicago does have a bigger rep, at every level (undergrad, grad/pro, PhD). It does so because of the highly intellectual atmosphere, several world-class programs, and all those Nobels.
But Brown is well known for its open curriculum, happy students, and Ivy League badge. Since students can design their own curricula, the majors (and double-major combos) are nearly endless.
While I think most acknowledge that academic rigor/workload and heavy intellectualism are positives, some would prefer the relatively more laid-back vibe at Brown.
Rep is given too much clout by too many people, but there it is: I think that rep-wise, Chicago and Brown are about even. Chicago is on the rise, however, and it may not be long before its rep catches up with its quality.
I personally have Chicago in a peer group with Columbia and maybe Penn… just below HYPSM for now.
It is hard to measure prestige in any objective fashion.
I remember reading somewhere, that in Texas, A&M has more prestige than either Brown or Chicago!! It all depends on your perspective. So it is all in the eyes of the beholder.
Having said that, If going to an Ivy league is important, then obviously only one school has that label, Brown. I know of parents for whom this is the gold standard of prestige. Nothing else matters. So by that measure Brown and all other Ivies would be considered higher prestige, even if people may not know which colleges make up the Ivy league. Just being able to casually tell somebody “Oh, yeah, my kid goes to an Ivy league school” beats saying “My kid goes to University of Chicago” and get blank stares or horror or horrors, have the listener confuse it with a “state school” 
Penn and Chicago both suffer from this unfortunate confusion, but only among the lay population. Anybody who knows about colleges would not have this confusion. Of course among this latter group, the next question would be “Which Ivy” and then you get into this “Ivy tiering” issue, where HYP is the gold standard, with Columbia and Penn making the mid tier and Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell occupying the next tier in terms of prestige within the Ivies.
If you try to measure prestige by the yield to admit ratio ( see this discussion for more on this topic)
then they are fairly similar now, but I think Chicago may have a better trajectory here given its new found ranking advantage, specially given that Brown has ED, which naturally increases its yield rate and gives it a better ratio.
If you compare academic prestige, in terms of awards, recognition and other such measures, I think Chicago does better.
So take your pick. If lay prestige is more important, go Brown, If “academic prestige” is more important, pick “Chicago” but my advice would be, “forget prestige” and look at the schools very carefully. They are very different and no matter what you decide in terms of prestige, I don’t think both schools will be good fit for the same student. Based on the student, one school or other may be a better fit and that should inform the decision on where to spend four years.
I think @prezbucky has it just about right as a general matter. But “prestige” isn’t a uniform, objective quality. It varies with location and audience. The general public doesn’t know much about either of them. However, for the past generation plus, starting, I think, with President Jimmy Carter’s daughter Amy and John F. Kennedy, Jr., Brown has made a point of recruiting and admitting a lot of students who are children of well-known (and well-heeled) people, or who are celebrities in their own right. So people who follow celebrities may have heard about Brown because Emma Watson (or whoever) went there.
If you were at a New England (or California) boarding/prep school or high-performance suburban public, until a few years ago the clear answer would have been that Brown had more prestige, but at this point I think Chicago has caught up and maybe even passed it. If you were at the same sort of school in St. Louis or Minneapolis, Chicago probably had higher prestige for longer.
One of my kids had a friend who turned down Stanford and Columbia for Brown 10 years ago, and was perfectly happy with his decision. No one (or hardly anyone – my other kid knew someone) was making choices like that in favor of Chicago at the time, but I hear reports that it happens more frequently now.
If you are looking at people who are aware of and cared about graduate program strength, then Chicago has been more prestigious than Brown approximately since the University of Chicago opened its doors in the 1890s. Brown is largely undergraduate-focused, and by and large its undergraduate program is better regarded than its graduate programs, including its medical school. Chicago has a plethora of world-class PhD and professional programs. It’s undergraduate college went through a difficult period in the 1950s-1970s, when the Ivies and Stanford were really cementing their hold on public imagination of what a high-quality undergraduate program was. But it’s graduate programs never had that kind of lag. For that reason, if you look at international rankings like the Time of London or Shanghai, Chicago is usually in the top 10-15 in the world, even though it lacks a full engineering program, and Brown is way down the list.
In reality, they are peers. There isn’t enough prestige difference between them for that to make a difference to anyone with that particular binary choice.
wow everyone where I live thinks Brown is more “prestigious” and an all around stronger school.
what about brown vs penn?
@allima I would say Penn. As with the Brown-Chicago comparison yes the differential isn’t huge but Penn is the overall stronger school in terms of departmental strength, research output, has a richer, more influential alumni network, bigger global reach, more superstar professors, more resources in general etc.
^Yup. But anyone asking this question should be reminded that when choosing among Brown, Penn and UChicago – three very different schools with different environments, academic cultures and social vibes – the applicant should choose based on fit and finances, not rep.
If it were Directional State U vs. Brown… maybe then you let rep enter into the discussion. But not when you’re considering three relative peers.
Exactly. It all depends on who and where you ask. Go to Chicago or the Midwest and I doubt if you will get the same opinion. Go to the south and very few people will care about either schools. In the South, Duke, WashU, Vanderbilt, Rice etc may have better reps/prestige.
Between Brown and Penn, since they are both Ivy and both have ED, it is a more apples to apples comparison and Penn is overwhelmingly the odds on favorite here in the sense that roughly 65% of students who are admitted to both schools seem to choose Penn over Brown. Now maybe this is because students perceive Penn has better FA packages or some such reason, but the discrepancy does exist.
“I know of parents for whom this is the gold standard of prestige. Nothing else matters.”
More true about a generation ago.
With the rise of Stanford, and to a lesser extent MIT, and to a further lesser extent Chicago and Duke, these days the people considering the 8 Ivies (if they know all of them) the absolute highest standard are fewer and fewer.
^75 % of applicants chose brown over penn actually lol
?? What is your source for this?
The only site that I know that tracks this kind of stuff, with all its inherent issues is parchment and Penn trounces Brown on cross-admits as per parchment
@allima not true at all. quite the opposite is most probably true actually.
@eddi137 you observation is very much on point. The rise of Stanford and also MIT has disrupted the whole HYP trifecta and also the rise of Chicago and Duke in addition to Stanford, MIT has changed what the Ivy League means. Nowadays when one talks about elite or prestigious schools it is meaningless to only refer to just the 8 ivies without also mentioning Stanford, MIT, Chicago and Duke. For example Stanford is more prestigious and a stronger university than either Yale or Princeton these days, in my opinion.
The Ivies as a group have never had an exclusive hold on prestige. They were, and are, a collection of marvelous, admirable, high-quality colleges within somewhat different universities. But there have always been plenty of institutions that were understood to be just as good by people who were familiar with American higher education, ranging from tiny LACs like Amherst or Swarthmore to Berkeley or Michigan. Forty years ago, when my sister started there, Stanford was a darn fine place. It was not the equivalent of HYP yet (nor were the top LACs, for that matter), but it could certainly hold its own with any other place. Chicago was the academic equivalent of enlisting in the Marines, and those who made it through “basic” there definitely considered themselves (and were considered by others) as “the few, the proud.”
Apply to both. Go visit. Wait until your decision comes in. No use getting into the prestige thing because you need to get in first. And prestige needs to be the last thing if at all as to why you choose a school.
General tiers of the “elite” schools:
Tier 1: Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, MIT
Tier 2: Columbia, Caltech, Chicago
TIer 3: Penn, Duke
Tier 4: Dartmouth, Northwestern, Brown, Cornell
How accurate is Parchment for the cross-admit data? Generally it looks correct, but I’ve heard from many that it is junk.
It is self reported, so you have to take the data with a healthy dose of skepticism, but it is the only publicly available information on cross admits that I am aware of. My general feeling is that if it is statistically significant (the cross admit data is color coded in red and green for the 95% confidence interval), then it might be directionally correct. So do 65% of cross admits choose Penn over Brown? Who knows, but directionally I think a majority of cross admits probably choose Penn over Brown.
Another issue is that it does not take into account that one of the schools you might compare might be an EA school and the other might be an ED school. That could completely skew the data
I would say these are the Top 10 in undergraduate education in the US right now: Caltech/Brown (personal preference), Chicago, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, MIT, Penn, Princeton, Stanford and Yale
If you are lucky enough to get into more than one of these, then finding your fit against the following Five C’s becomes really important:
- Cost
- Curriculum
- Career
- Community
- Culture.
Depending on how you weigh these metrics and how you score these schools on the each of the five C’s, you may arrive at a very different ranking vs some other student. No single ranking can address the needs of all students.