<p>This is an issue I have began to think about more and more. I recently read a NY Times article slamming the new "Top 1000 High Schools" for the way they figured out which school goes where. I must also admit I am a victim of the system and have read all of the US News Rankings.</p>
<p>But I am really wondering whether or not these rankings matter when you're searching for a job. Do companies care where your school is on this list, or the quality of the candidate?</p>
<p>How legitimate are US News' rankings, and who are they to tell us which school is the best?</p>
<p>I write this as a student struggling to choose between two school's business programs. One ranked much higher than the other(according to US News).</p>
<p>Think of it like this. It is much easier to succede coming out of a high ranking school than it is out of a lower ranked school. Great student come out of like Dakota Central College but it would be easier to get a great job from like Yale with teh sma degree.</p>
<p>Almost all the teachers at my school strongly condemn the rankings. They take a strong "it's the student, not the institution" approach. Allow me to paraphrase one of my teachers "You can learn the same **** at a third tier university that you learn at Harvard, the only difference is that Harvard gives harder tests." So, based on that ideology you can get the same education at any school, if you push yourself. </p>
<p>Of course, most of the kids on CC will tell you that you're screwed for life if you don't get into a top 25 university.</p>
<p>All things being equal (price, interest in school) go to the best school possible. In business a good school is important. Most can only recruit at a limited number of schools and they choose the better ones. A
Wharton resume will always get attention.</p>
<p>Internships and jobs will be easier for people who graduate from the top colleges so I think it matters a lot. I agree with zagat, Wharton resumes are very convincing to large companies and firms.</p>
<p>one, businesses can recruit on as many campuses as theyd like. some choose to recruit on a limited number, however. what is important to note is that this does not mean you cant get a job at one of these companies if you didnt attend one of these schools. i know because i had offers from nearly everywhere earlier this spring. </p>
<p>two, large financial corporations have their own lists. instead of looking at a usnews or businessweek ranking, find the postgraduate placement reports for your school. see where people got jobs. if you cant find this online, email the university and ask for it.</p>
<p>three, outside the world of big business you can throw everything ive said above out the window. in the rest of the world the prestige of your undergradute institution will only matter on the margin. in other words, attending the school you prefer and feel you can be more successful at is far more important than attending the one with more prestige.</p>
<p>four, when people say that things are easier coming from top colleges they arent entirely incorrect. theres a difference between harvard and western podunk agricultural and technical. but most people arent faced with that choice. rather, its a decision between two top colleges because in the real world the penn states a top college, too.</p>
<p>When people say your college matters, they don't mean the difference between Harvard and Emory, or even Harvard and whatever college that is ranked 100. Like Eric said, they mean the difference between the 1st or 2nd (maybe even 3rd or 4th) tier national university/liberal arts college and a 4th tier comprehensive bachelor college.</p>
<p>There's a huge world outside CC where not everyone is part of the top 1% of high school students. <em>GASP</em></p>
<p>For instance, there was this one time when my teacher was listing what she thought were top competitive selective schools, and she listed places like Texas A&M and University of Kentucky (schools most people at CC would consider to be safeties).</p>
<p>While their decisions aren't necessarily based on rankings, there are many firms (particularly in investment banking, consulting, private equity) where if you didn't go to one of ~ 30 colleges, it is nearly impossible to get a job there. So, unless you are one of the very best students in the history of Penn State, it is basically impossible to get these jobs, while if you are any student at HYP, an average student at Dartmouth, Brown, Williams, Amherst or an above average student at Bowdoin, Tufts, Middlebury, Colgate, Hamilton you've got a shot. Not that this should be the driving force in the college selection process, but it's something to keep in mind for how recruiting will work in paying off the residual of a $180,000 bill. Plus, there's always grad school to re-establish yourself with probably more focus at that point.</p>
<p>i just posted this in another discussion, but it is quite relevant here.</p>
<p>its also important to point out that only a handful of schools are known nationwide. for example, if you told someone in new england that you go to cal tech, most would think you were at a vocational school. most people on the west coast have never heard of the amazing LACs east of the mississippi. rice, chicago, uva- terrific schools but the vast majority has no clue what these are.</p>
<p>I have no clue why you don't think people in New England are aware of Caltech. Pretty much everyone and their dog knows about CHYMPS - Caltech, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Stanford.</p>
<p>If you want to be a doctor, teacher, nurse, and many other things, school doesn't much matter. If you plan to pursue a Ph.D., you can find a list of the best schools to go to that will not correlate with a list of the highest ranked schools. Business is different. School matters. This is not to say that many, many people who do not go to schools known for getting grads top jobs in business don't do equally well. It is to say that some schools will greatly help your odds at getting top jobs in business.</p>
<p>Raspberry, you'll find that there are as many perspectives as there are people. I encourage you not to take what every teacher says at face value. Although they mean well, do your own research.</p>
<p>nastynash- because i have met very few people outside academia who knows what cal tech is. most people go to school within a 6 hour radius from their home (and thats from numerous articles i have read, not just my opinion), and therefore new englanders set their sights on MIT rather than cal tech. this includes a good friend of mine who went to mit and is now at the #1 med school- before she got to mit, she had no clue about cal tech. also- i am a voracious reader of all sorts, and constantly read up on colleges, admissions, majors, that sort of thing- i find the whole college process fascinating. and i only realized what cal tech actually was about a year ago. so i highly doubt that the average person and his dog walking down the street in say, maine, know what cal tech is.</p>
<p>OK, I probably did generalize since I'm at Yale and every single person there knows what Caltech is. It is perhaps just a tragic sign of a lack of curiosity that your friend at MIT didn't know Caltech was.</p>
<p>Many years ago I moved from Michigan to Massachusetts, and then back to Michigan. Back in Michigan, I was talking to a friend of mine, and mentioned MIT. He was puzzled, so I explained what MIT was all about. He said, "Oh, it's sort of like the Detroit Institute of Technology" (a now-defunct engineering college).</p>
<p>High school teachers are often disgusted at the USNWR rankings simply because they didn't attend a top-ranked college. They would often look at HYMPS as breeding grounds for elitism and pretentiousness. Of course they would tell you that you can get just as good an education from a state school as Harvard or Yale, because they think very highly of the education they received at state schools and of themselves. </p>
<p>Bottom line for HS juniors is: do your own research. And for HS seniors: don't be put down by a teacher who thinks you're a snob just because you got into HYMPS.</p>
<p>Chlor, most high school teachers are really just trying to show that if you don't get into a HYMPS whatever that it doesn't mean anything. You can be just as successful successful if you graduate from a third tier uni as if you grad from HYPSM. One of the teachers I had actually graduated from a top ranked university and even tells kids that they are gonna learn the same under graduate stuff no matter where they attend college. That's coming from someone who graduated from College of Willam and Mary.</p>
<p>Another one of my teachers, this one went to UNC-Chapel Hill, once asked our class "what's the difference between the education at a community college and a 'top university'? Mostly, just a lot of money." While UNC-Chapel Hill and College of William and Mary may not be HYPMS there still two very prestigious schools. </p>
<p>Also, most teachers are very secure with the education they received and it doesn't matter much to them what name is on the degree. They have no bias against people who go to HYPSM, actually they are quite happy when one of their students makes into "top schools" its just that they want the other kids to know that even if they don't get into HYPSM, they still have just as good of a shot at success as the other kids.</p>
<p>to everyone who thinks that rankings dont matter: why waste ur time applying to the best schools why not just go to some low ranked school? according to you it doesnt matter? Most of people who say this are the ones who fear or were rejected from a top school and they are trying to rationalize wheree they are going. Yale will offer a much more stimulating envioronment than say Ohio state. Yale will offer a better education and more importantly Yale or anyother good school would open doors for graduates and provide many opportunities not accessible to your simple state school or low ranked private school graduates.</p>
<p>Well, of course. Objectively, I think the controversial USNews rankings spur on far too much debate about how the quality of the top 30 colleges compare to one another, to the point where most students and parent alike lose sight of the fact that those top 30 are the widely viewed as the finest colleges in America, and that assigning them an abitrary number, such as Harvard v. Princeton, or Tufts v. Johns Hopkins, or Duke v. Georgetown, that can change by a yearly basis is absurd.</p>