<p>I've recently been accepted to a masters nursing program at Johns Hopkins University and have other applications at large, specifically Yale and Columbia. </p>
<p>My question is which graduate program will be most respectable, a degree from a school renowned for medicine, or a school that is prestigious in general such as Yale? This is not to say that Yale's nursing program does not pull its weight. These are the dreaded rankings according to US News overall and for my specialty:</p>
<p>Hopkins, 4th overall and unranked in my specialty</p>
<p>Yale, 7th overall and 4th in my specialty</p>
<p>I don't know how I should be approaching this. I am utterly clueless as far as which degree would have more bearing. I've posted on another forum and received only two responses.</p>
<p>First, let me say congratulations!!! That's pretty sweet.</p>
<p>Can you hold off from Hopkins? If so, I'd wait until you have all of your acceptances, and then choose which school you'd like to attend based on everything else except rank/prestige. All of those schools are going to give you a great education and a great name to go along with it. But some aspects of Johns Hopkins might not be as favorable (in your mind) as Yale's, and so on, and so forth. For example, perhaps Johns Hopkins has a lot of patient-based, hands-on learning, while Yale's is more in-class... that's not necessarily true, but that's the type of thing I suggest basing your decision on.</p>
<p>Those are my two cents, and I hope they help.</p>
<p>Cheers and best of luck with the whole process!!! =)</p>
<p>Everyone on this website is always deploring individuals who care about the overall prestige of the school as opposed to the individual program's strength. I completely disagree. For example, Harvard is obviously a prestigious university, yet it's engineering program isn't highly ranked. Purdue is just the opposite. Now where do you think the stronger PhD candidates are? Where is it harder to be accepted and thus filled with more capable individuals (on average)? Where is the academic environment more rigorous and motivating? </p>
<p>So anyway, gstb, it seems as though you're having this debate with yourself. Johns Hopkins is a great school but Yale is a much more prestigious one. Here's a thought experiment. When you graduate, you'll inevitably tell people where you attended school (whether in social or job settings). If you went to Yale, it's implicit that you are a strong candidate and extremely intelligent (despite their lower ranked program). There's a 'wow' factor because of the school at large. But if you go to Hopkins, you'll always have to add a disclaimer (this is unfortunate but there is a hierarchy of colleges in America). You'll say things like, "I went to Hopkins." Inevitably followed by, "They have the best medicine program." And if you don't get this tidbit of information out, the average person probably won't be that impressed. Just some food for thought.</p>
<p>gstb, don't get me wrong. I wasn't deploring you for caring about prestige... I was saying that all three of those schools have similar prestige-- similar enough where other things probably should matter more in the decision making process. I recommend waiting to decide until you hear back from all of your schools first-- I've heard several stories of people changing their minds after "accepted students" weekends at grad schools. If you ultimately end up liking Johns Hopkins the best, my advice would be to go for it. I think that anyone worth impressing will have heard of Johns Hopkins-- that's my OPINION anyways.</p>