I’m revisiting my answer from a few pages ago.
I expressed a strong preference for CTCL or “Eight of the Best” schools and card more about those labels than I should have.
So on the topic of psychology’s rigor – twice in my career have I had very prominent experimental psychologists, National Academy of Science members both – say that they would have gone into physics, except it is easier to become a top psychologist than a top physicist. I am not sure I would agree entirely that psychology is always easy, but I would suggest that if you are not a genius mathematician, it is unlikely you will become a prominent physicist. In psychology, it takes a range of skills to be top notch, including experimental design, writing skills, creativity, and quite a bit of insight into human behavior.
As for psychology majors – if you do not enjoy higher math, then you will find many undergraduate social science majors easier than science/engineering, etc. On the other hand, for a graduate degree in social sciences these days, higher math/statistics is increasingly expected. Furthermore, some mathy people I know find writing/ literary analysis much more difficult than math, and would think that an English Lit major is the hardest major of all.
In the vast majority of situations and industries, a student does not require vetting by a prestigious college or prep school to be successful. I posted some employer surveys earlier showing college name was the least influential factor in hiring decisions among new grads on average. Employer surveys had a more favorable average rating of flagships than “elite” colleges. Of course there are exceptions. I believe you mentioned your child went into investment banking. Elite investment banking type employers often do emphasize college name prestige, among other unique criteria.
not at all although he did apply to several reach schools that would be considered prestigious (because they had a great bioinformatics program) I wanted him to be happy at a school that would prepare him for medical school or grad school in the event he wanted to go. I proudly have stickers on my car even though I did not go there and I wear my baseball cap to the gym all the time. I am so thankful he is challenged in an environment where they really seem to care about their students.
I am sensitive to the value of prestige as I attended three of HYPSM and taught at one early in my career. In the fields I chose, each choice increased the probability of good things happening but hard work and talent were also required. In addition to a high quality education (which one can get at many schools), the high end schools shape horizons (for better or worse, people set higher aspirations on average) and create great networks of contacts. My network include a couple of Fortune 500 CEOs, high-level private equity folks, a couple of university presidents, leading scientists, some senior folks at the World Bank, a few very successful entrepreneurs. Depending upon what one chooses, that network and the high aspirations can be invaluable.
But, prestige depends upon the field. My observation is that in computer science, going to most Ivies would be inferior to some of the major state universities (e.g., UIUC). And, if one wanted to study nursing and didn’t want to be a professor of nursing, there would be no reason to go to Penn or Yale. Prospective employers judge you on the jobs you have had. In art, I think a couple of NY city schools and RISD give you entrees that other schools for the most part don’t. If I knew I were going to want to be a technology entrepreneur, I would say Stanford with its ecosystem is extraordinary and no one is a close second.
With my two kids, I handled things very different. My son was truly gifted academically and severely dyslexic. I thought prestige could be important for him – either to go to grad school or to get labeled as really smart to move into the right kinds of jobs. However, I guided him towards a high-end LAC over my alma mater and another Ivy because I thought with small classes, the professors would recognize what they had more quickly and also because at my alma mater, he wouldn’t have been able to avoid classes with 400 pages of weekly reading. All has gone really well for him and I believe the prestige helped. Started a company and raised funding and ran it for 1.5 years then applied for MBA and Data Science MS. I believe 3.96 GPA summa cum laude in math/econ/behavioral econ from prestigious LAC combined with co-founding and running an interesting tech startup led to admission at age 23 to very competitive MBA program. He’s finishing up school but he and a partner have raised a several million dollar seed round for a new company that was made much more likely by being at a prestigious school.
My daughter was very bright but in a more concrete way and also very anxious about competition (which may have come from following a hyper-competitive brother). After my daughter decided to switch from science to nursing, she considered three schools in the Boston area. The least prestigious (externally, though it is well regarded in nursing circles) admitted her for transfer after the transfer deadline in part because she’d done so well in HS compared to their normal admits. It had a 5 year BSN/MSN program that she was admitted to conditional on maintaining a high enough average (which was easier given that the competition was probably a little weaker until they merged with a group of direct entry kids who had BA or BS degrees, usually in science, from other schools). She became a nurse practitioner at age 23, has just started her second job, and I don’t believe anyone is looking at where she got her degree, just that she passed the harder certification exam and had worked for a year.
In her case, prestige didn’t matter and I didn’t push it at all. In my son’s case, I thought it would matter, pushed it but thoughtfully, and I believe it has mattered.
@pscholing, I’m not in psychology but was offered a post-doc from a psych prof (at a prestigious university) I’d taken a few classes from. My PhD was in the applied math-y world. However, I’ve read a lot of psychology due to my work and met a number of very well-known psychologists. In my experience, many tenured psych professors in the fields I know something about seem pretty sloppy in their reasoning. At the same time, some are extraordinarily good – just fundamentally gifted thinkers, but I don’t think graduate training (at least in the old days) trained for that or required it. I spent some time with Amos Tversky and have read much of what he wrote (mostly with Kahneman) and he was as bright as anyone I’ve met. Each study he’d describe led me to say, “Well here are the alternative explanations for that result.” He’d say, “Well, Danny and I thought about those alternative explanations and so we ran the following experiments to rule them out.” Very, very impressive. I’ve read some work by Martin Seligman that shows first-rate thinking. Kahneman (never met but have read and also found Michael Lewis’s book revealing – Kahneman may have been the more creative of the K-T pair). Ross. Lots of respect for Darley. I just think it was the people who were good and not the graduate training. I think the same would be true for sociology. In contrast, if you can’t think crisply and clearly, you would probably never make it through a physics PhD program. The minimum threshold is much higher.
We were not “hung up” on prestige but it was an important consideration. I think prestige is akin to love and good looks–it’s really in the eye of the beholder. The colleges my kids chose may seem prestigious to some but not to others. Prestige to my high stat kids meant positive name recognition, high rankings, highly regarded academic programs, strong students. Nice campus and academic and recreational facilities. Competing factors that weighed heavily in our decision were cost/affordability and fit. While my kids could have applied to and gotten accepted to a few top 30 national universities and liberal arts colleges which likely would be seen as more “objectively” prestigious, we knew those were unrealistic options because those schools would not offer sufficiently high merit aid or need-based aid fo be able to afford to attend. What I’ve learned from the college search is that there are a lot of great schools in the USA and anyway it’s up to the motivation of the student as to the ultimate success of the undergraduate experience. The schools my kids chose offer strong academic programs in their areas of interest, have talented students, nice facilities and thankfully are good fits.
For us, prestige is something to consider but not the primary factor. My son did not get into his top choice (prestigious) school during early decision. As a result, he applied to a few more schools that are super interested in him and offering a lot of money. Currently, his goal is the least expensive undergraduate degree as he is planning on graduate school. I would say that our focus has shifted during the process. Ultimately, it will come down to fit and finances.
@shawbridge I am not sure the point of your post, and I would not say your limited experience in meeting a few psychologists, taking a few grad level classes and reading some books qualifies you as an expert. So, you will need to trust me that your top notch National Academy of Science psychologists will intellectually exceed your run of the mill physicists in most areas. In fact, I am married to a physicist, I know many of his physicist friends, and can say that in most every day activities (a game of logic, figuring out how to put together a piece of furniture, researching a medical issue for someone in our family, navigating a complex legal problem) I run circles around him and his peers. On the other hand he is much better than me at pure math, and I can’t make heads or tails of his journal articles. I happen to a better coder than him (which isn’t saying much), and our son exceeds both of us in this arena.
Yet, of all people I have met in my life, the smartest one is probably Noam Chomsky, a linguist!
When money is no object, ambitious kids b-line to prestige, to mix with the best of the best. All the other noise is just parents and alums who either don’t know any better or have a chip of their shoulder for lacking prestige credentials.
Don’t confuse major and/or it’s difficulty with intelligence. Majors are supposed to be about interest and passion. I have two older brothers. Both extremely intelligent. Oldest bro was a Chem Engineer / Econ double major from Maryland who went on to HBS, MBB and ran a biotech company. Middle bro was a psych major who went on to get a PhD in neuro psych from UT - Austin. During the admissions process for grad school, he was informed he scored higher on the GREs (or whatever it is) than the admission officer had ever seen. He went on to become a human performance expert, runs a consultancy, guest lectures at Tufts and has testified before congress on many occasions. Currently working on a project to improve air traffic control. No offense to my older brother, but the psych major is the smart one in the family.
Prestige was not worth the extra $40K/yr at top 20 privates. Nearly free (~100 ranking) was not worth the lack of prestige. Our state flagship was already a top 10 engineering school, the alma mater for 3 generations in our family, and was the best value for us, even at full (in-state) price.
For a new member, you found the broad brush and arrogance of a veteran. Welcome.
@TooOld4School You assume that it will cost everyone an extra 40K/yr, what if it was the same, like for my DD. Total cost for both the state flagship and the top 20 private was …$120K.
@CU123 ‘Was’ for us does not equal ‘Is’ for everyone. No assumption made. At the same price that seems an easy decision.
That’s a very narrow view. There is a certain subgroup of ambitious kids who are very focused on prestige, which is overrepresented on this forum. However, they are the minority. Most ambitious kids do not apply to any HYPSM… college, particularly kids from not high SES, not selective public schools. And no, I don’t “have a chip on my shoulder for lacking prestige credentials”. I have 3 degrees from HYPSM.
Answering the OP’s question, when I was a student in HS, I really enjoyed numerically analyzing things, including colleges. To choose a college, I started with the 200 to 300 schools that were somewhat selective on an objective scale and offered the majors that interested me, which were mostly engineering fields. Next I ranked those schools on a wide variety of criteria including strength of major, major distribution, location, class size, male/female ratio, student/faculty ratio, percent Greek, … essentially any stat that was available and had some kind of importance to me. I applied a weighted ranking system on these criteria. My rankings had a notable correlation with prestige, but there were many missing colleges. For example, the top 2 were MIT and Stanford, and some Ivies also did well, particularly Cornell; but Yale was in the lower half, and Harvard did not make the top 200 - 300. My parents vetoed 2 of my higher ranked colleges – Berkeley and Rice – due to old stereotypes along the lines nobody hires graduates from Berkeley because they protest, and Rice is racist because they are in the deep south. They didn’t appear to have any problem with varied prestige levels. My dad made it clearly would have greatly preferred a college in Maine, nearer to where he grew up, but there were no colleges I liked in that area. So instead he encouraged me to choose Brown, which did make the list, because he heard/read somewhere that it was “the Ivy League for airheads,” and thought that was funny. I looked in to the remaining top ~10 colleges in my ranking system more closely and thought more subjectively about which of those colleges I’d like to attend. I ended up choosing Stanford over MIT for a variety of these subjective reasons.
The process @Data10 used to analyze and select a college is very similar to what my son (future math major) used. Interestingly, son’s rankings also didn’t result in any Ivys other than Cornell being a top choice for consideration.
@Data10 “Most ambitious kids do not apply to any HYPSM… college, particularly kids from not high SES, not selective public schools.”
A statement of opinion but stated as fact. How do you know what these kids do?
“strength of major”
That’s 90 if not 100% correlated with prestige. If that was weighted equally or higher than the other factors, there’s no way your list doesn’t correlate to the top-10 engineering schools per US News:
MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech, Berkley, Michigan, Illinois, CMU, Cornell, Ga Tech, Purdue. You could add Penn and Texas-Austin as 11 and 12 if you wanted a NE or SW option.
So what’s the difference between you and someone applying to the the colleges above by just looking at the US News ranking? None really, although I do appreciate as an engineer, the analytics you did.
How much did I care about prestige? Less than you might think, more than I might like to admit.
I did my undergrad at Harvard and grad degree at Columbia. I twice got jobs based on the Harvard degree, even though everything I know about architecture I learned at Columbia. Name recognition counts - especially overseas.
My oldest kid was always the smartest kid in the room and never had to work hard for his A’s. He spent most of his out of school time teaching himself stuff to do with computers and playing games. My number one wish for him was to end up in a place where he’d be surrounded by kids who were smarter than him and he’d actually have to learn to work hard. His number one wish was to get into the best computer science program possible. His grades and scores meant that high prestige colleges were matches. He ended up choosing Carnegie Mellon over Harvard - in CS it’s got more prestige. For another less single minded kid Harvard is a fine place to study CS. They end up in the same sorts of jobs as the CMU grads (perhaps more in banking and finance), but if you aren’t interested in the rest of what Harvard offers in terms of extra-curriculars or residential life a more techie vibe may be preferable.
Younger son isn’t so out there brilliant though he’s still plenty smart. Most of the schools he applied to are fairly prestigious as well. He was looking for a good international relations program, a real campus, and near an urban area. Ended up at Tufts, but seriously considered U of Chicago. After some NGO work he ended up going to Officer Candidate School and is a Naval Officer. I don’t think anyone cares where he went to school!