Hooboy, I can see the dilemma now.

Parents Forum
101

<p>Mantori -</p>

<p>If you want to live a peaceful life on CC you gotta learn the unwritten rules. And the number one rule is never be so honest as to say anything about prestige. The only permissible mention of prestige is to sneer at it, otherwise you will get no peace.</p>

<p>Go ahead and have your son apply to HYPSM if he wants to. They are wonderful schools. Just be sure to talk about it on CC only in terms of what a great “fit” they all are for him. And you will find yourself joined by a legion of other CC parents in sneering at prestige and praising fit, all while they’re trying every strategy they can think of to get their kids into the most prestigious schools on the planet. All in the name of “fit” of course.</p>

102

<p>Cynic. </p>

<p>====</p>

<p>I believe in “fit” very much and nothing that I’ve seen or experience has ever dissuaded me from embracing the notion.</p>

<p>But I’ve been forced to recalibrate, at least slightly, my opinion about prestige as some experiences have demonstrated to me that it matters more than I would have supposed. I still think “prestige” is a lousy criteria for choosing a college but I would now weigh it a little heavier as one component on the scale I once would have.</p>

<p>Hope that’s not too muddled.</p>

103

<p>Coureur, I don’t have a problem considering a school’s reputation. The word prestige just rubs me the wrong way. IOW, the benefit of a good reputation is that the <em>school</em> is recognized by people in the know as providing a quality education and hence the student can be assured of getting a good education. The benefit of prestige is that the <em>student</em> has bragging rights / impressed others by his / her choice of school. </p>

<p>Of course HYPSM (et al) are both prestigious and excellent. All of the top 20 schools are; to be willing to pay for HYPSM but be hesitant about a “lower” top 20 (the Vanderbilt example) says that someone’s overestimating the prestige factor and cutting it just a bit too finely.</p>

104

<p>I love fit, prestige, reputation, however you want to cut the pie. So Coureur can’t throw me into the CC pit of hypocrisy. Those things are very important to me.</p>

<p>But it’s a dangerous game to decide up-front that one’s own Prestige-o-meter renders some schools “not worth paying for” and others are… unless you have a truly broad and comprehensive view of the country and every employment sector and every type of grad school and every known important fellowship.</p>

<p>I meet people all the time who have never heard of Williams, or Swarthmore, or Bryn Mawr, or Reed, or who think that U. Chicago is a state school and that only a loser would choose Harvey Mudd over U. Wisconsin. (at least they’ve heard of Wisconsin.) There are also folks who believe in Ivy or bust; who would rather their kid study computer science at BU or GW since those are expensive schools, rather than at UIUC which is a state school (and less expensive, at least for Illinios residents).</p>

<p>Why does any of this matter? I guess at the margins it does- having some level of Wow at the grocery store is important when you’re paying the bills. But prestige and reputation are significant for things like getting into grad school, getting a job, applying for a Fulbright, and are less signficant when you’re talking to people who just have no clue about any college other than who is winning at football or basketball that particular week. </p>

<p>I work in corporate human resources for a very big global company and have been doing this or related work for decades. The companies I’ve worked for choose pretty carefully where we hire. Sometimes it is directly correlated to the strength of different departments (engineering, all the scientific disciplines). Sometimes it is cultural (if you want new hires who are fluent in different languages and don’t mind moving to Peru next week, go recruit at BYU.) Sometimes it is convenience (Wharton is close to an Amtrak station and the Philadelphia airport doesn’t close for bad weather as often as Logan). And yes, sometimes it is prestige but the prestige is usually founded on facts. (Fact- you won’t have to teach an MIT grad how to read a bar chart, and you won’t have to teach a Yale grad how to write a coherent three page summary of a 400 page document.)</p>

<p>So I applaud the effort to figure out a college for one’s own kid which is affordable, meets your kids educational needs, and which is a good “value” for everyone. I just cringe a little when a parent is ready to sell a kidney for Harvard but won’t consider Hopkins or Northwestern. Maybe your own state U is a better fit, all things considered, than Hopkins. Or maybe not. But certainly worth exploring just a little bit before you shut the door. And yes, I have a neighbor who thinks that CalTech is a community college for kids who can’t get into Santa Barbara. (I don’t live in California). How she heard of Santa Barbara I don’t know…there must be a TV show which takes place at that campus. But she’s always so helpful for kids looking into community college! LOL.</p>

105

<p>Blossom: LOL!
Prestige for its own sake rubs me the wrong way because I’m against brand names. I’m quite happy toting my $60 handbag instead of a Birkin worth a year’s college tuition because I’m convinced that my $60 handbag does exactly the same job as would a Birkin–carrying my belongings.
But I do believe there is a difference not just in prestige but in the quality of education and other experiences to be obtained in different schools. Where it lies is difficult to say and it may have little to do with rankings. What could the difference be between #45 and the number #55, for instance, as opposed to #15 and #25? Is the difference between the OP’s state school and UCSD or Wisconsin only about prestige? or is there a difference in quality? How much of a difference? I happen to think that many southern schools are way undervalued. Have many heard of Sewannee College? I was surprised at how high scoring its students were. I’m convinced that, if it were not for its location in TN, it would be far better known, on a par with NE LACs.</p>

<p>When the OP talks about difference, the OP seems to refer ONLY to prestige, not some other factors. Yet Blossom is right. Why should one care if some people think that CalTech is a community college or a state college, or have never heard of it? Those who value math/science education know that it is as good as/better than HYPSM. And for those interested in marine biology, it may well be better to go to UCSD than to HYPSM; if interested in engineering, I would not recommend H or Y, but would happily suggest RPI.
I’m pretty sure that the UIUC CompSci department can give H’s a run for its money. NYU’s Anthro department is much stronger than H’s. Wisconsin’s Southeast Asian Studies are better than H’s (where they don’t even exist) and so on and so forth… Prestige? bah…</p>

106

<p>There is no reason to be defensive about focusing on prestige in determining whether or not one willing to pay for a school. It is prestige–not impressionistic ex ante views about “quality” or unreliable predictions about “fit”–that determines the value that will be placed on a degree by the outside observers who will be evaluating the student for jobs, graduate school, etc. after he graduates. Put in simple terms, prestige increases the objective value of a degree.</p>

107

<p>

</p>

<p>I think several of us are saying the same thing. For example, since I have a good state flagship (UIUC), there’s no way I’m paying OOS tuition for, say, Eastern Montana or Arizona State, barring some exceptional or unique program that isn’t offered anywhere else in the country. But OOS tuition for Michigan? UVA? Of course.</p>

<p>I guess the question is … how far down the list is one willing to go? Like blossom, I don’t understand paying for Harvard but not JHU types of tradeoffs – it seems that either way, you’re getting a great prestige - er, reputation - bang for your buck. I think it’s a little pretentious to cut the top 20 into sub-tiers of “worth paying for” and “sorry, buddy, back to your state flagship.” My line of “sorry, buddy, back to your state flagship” goes a lot lower than that. Though to be honest, I can’t articulate exactly where it is. Maybe it’s like porn, I know it when I see it.</p>

108

<p>In fairness to mantori.suzuki, I read a post from her on another forum in which she speaks very convincingly about how, if her son were so inclined towards a technical / vocational degree, she would support that. So perhaps she’s been judged too harshly on the prestige topic.</p>

109

<p>Prestige does not necessarily increase the value of a degree. As Mini has repeatedly said, people in PNW confuse Wellesley and Whitman. And if I were to hire a comp sci graduate, I’d probably go to one who graduated from RPI than H or Y. Lots of students attend their state unis and get jobs in their own states.</p>

110

<p>yeah the common example that I use is that in engineering, Purdue is more well known among employers than Yale or Dartmouth. Purdue has an 81% acceptance rate and most people think the school is easy since it’s basically a walk-in. But engineering is tough there and as a result graduates get a leg up on graduates from many other more “prestigious” overall universities</p>

111

<br>

<br>

<p>Blossom, I agree with you…up to a point. I’m willing to pay HYPSM prices for a school ranked below HYPSM on USNews or the prestige-o-meter or what have you. But only up to a point. There is a line, and I don’t know exactly where it is - it may be something of a case-by-case thing, below which UCLA or a similar, cheaper school starts looking like the more compelling choice. The issue has never come up but I’d probably pay for JHU. It’s a fine school. But there are some very expensive schools out there that are only middle-of-the-road quality-wise. And if one of my kids suddenly wanted to go to one of those, I’d start asking for it to be explained to me what were the real advantages of this school over a cheaper state school of similar quality.</p>

<p>My overarching college strategy for my kids has always been to send them to the best schools that they could get it into. The key word in this discussion of course is “best.” How is that defined? A lazy way to define it is to use prestige as a surrogate for quality. After all, HYP did not get their prestige by accident or random chance. There really is a lot of quality there. So if you just go for prestige the chances are pretty good that you will end up at an excellent school. But depending on your major or career goals, you may make a suboptimal choice if you rely solely on prestige. There may be stronger programs in your major at schools with less prestige. IMO it’s fine to choose the less-prestigious school in that case, because again I’m going for “best.”</p>

<br>

<br>

<p>One thing I discovered when D1 graduated from college last year is that companies can sometimes be just as big of prestige whores as the worst sort of CC parents. She applied and was accepted to a nifty year-long engineering fellowship in a global company. It’s a great program; she has learned a lot, and at the end the fellows are guaranteed full-time job offers as engineers. But last summer when they made the offer, the HR manager made it clear that she was being offered significantly more money than the program normally paid. Why? Because she was a Harvard graduate. They also showed her more flexibility than the others in accepting her even though her degree was only in a related field (Physics) rather than the exact major the program normally required (Engineering). They wanted kids from the top schools for their special fellowship program, and they wanted to make it as attractive as possible to make certain they landed her. Her experience was directly contrary to what pierre0913 relates in post #110. </p>

<p>My eyes were opened by that. Prior to that I would have guessed that any employment advantages to a HYPSM degree, if they existed at all, would have been less blatant and harder to quantify. But they had no qualms about stating it plainly. So people are free to sneer at prestige if they like, but in this instance it certainly paid off for D1.</p>

112

<p>

</p>

<p>Umm, my d just applied to law schools, and the determining factor was LSAT score first and foremost.</p>

113

<p>I didn’t mean to suggest that prestige of the degree was going to be the predominant factor in any particular employment or post-grad decision. However, it is a factor in many such decisions, which increases the objective value of the degree (whether by enough to offset the additional cost is a separate question). By contrast, the reaction of (for example) a potential employer to statements such as “my unknown school was a great fit” or “My unknown school was in CTCL and the teaching there was GREAT!” is almost certainly going to be something like “And I care?”</p>

<p>BTW, grades are also awfully important in the law school admissions process.</p>

114

<p>Coureur:</p>

<p>Very interesting experience of your D! S’s major is even less practical: he’s a purist :)</p>

115

<p>

</p>

<p>Of course, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.</p>

116

<p>

</p>

<p>Really? Isn’t that what’s being done everyday here at CC? To some degree, isn’t that why CC exists?</p>

<p>Students ask “chance me” to find out what’s the “best” school they can get into. Not the best school for them, but the BEST school. </p>

<p>We all have lists, reach/match/safety, all arrived at by a somewhat arbitrary process. Maybe we know people who went there, maybe we heard good things, maybe it was recommended by a guidance counselor, but ultimately we all have a cut-off point. With so many college options you have to have some sort of cut-off if only to make the process manageable. And what happens after we have the list? Many of us, and I’m guilty of this, put them in some sort of order, 1 through 10, best to “worst”. Then as the acceptances and rejections roll in we implicitly decide that Reach 2 “must be” a better choice than Match 4. </p>

<p>We all carve out our section of the college list and then go about deciding which places are worth our time and effort and which aren’t. There are discussions all over CC as to whether Flagship U is better than State U, or State U is that much better than local community college. Drop over to the UC discussion groups; I couldn’t tell you the difference between UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Claus, but there are plenty of people on those boards fretting over which one is best and whether the others are “worth it”.</p>

<p>These discussions aren’t simply financial, but they are driven by our perceptions of value received for money spent. Mantori has the luxury and the curse of considering HYPS, but it’s no different for the family deciding between Michigan and Grand Valley State or UCLA and Cal State Fullerton.</p>

117

<p>

</p>

<p>Understandably – because in your hypothetical it’s only middle of the road quality-wise. What if it was high quality, but just relatively unknown to most people … that is, excellent but not “prestigious”?</p>

<p>Maybe we’re talking in circles here about the audience of prestige. Prestige among the average Joe – couldn’t care less. It’s based on superficial familiarity. Prestige among employers, grad schools, etc. seems highly linked to quality and reputation, so that’s worth considering.</p>

118

<p>OP: After sleeping on it and reading some of your later comments, I want to apologize for my snarkiness in previous posts. I think I’m beginning to understand where you’re coming from a little bit more. Quality is worth paying for, for sure, whatever we perceive quality to be. My only concern is that you not confuse quality with name recognition or some other related phenomenon. Also, that you understand that “Super-Duper No. 1 Top-Ranked in the Universe U” may or may not be the best school for any given student. “Fit” is often mocked but profoundly important.</p>

<p>I did develop a different concern, however. Your S is a rising senior, right? In my D’s case, the change in maturity from end of junior year to graduation was unbelievable. This time last year, she was a very intelligent, reasonably mature, but still often flightly, kid who needed significant parental input and guidance. Today, she’s an adult who will make plenty of mistakes, but who no longer wants or needs my advice, and who we both know is capable of making her own decisions. I’m very glad that I let her take the lead in deciding where to go to school; she made a much better choice for herself than I would have. </p>

<p>I guess what I’m saying, with due respect, is that you seem very involved in this choice process, perhaps even a bit too involved. Trust your son, and let him take the lead. He’ll make a good decision, even if it’s not the one you would have made.</p>

119

<br>

<br>

<p>I’m willing to pay for such a school. In fact I <em>am</em> paying for such a school. That’s a pretty good description of D2’s school. It’s an outstanding college of very high quality, but especially out here on the west coast most people have only vaguely heard of it if they’ve heard of it at all. And not one “man on the street” in a hundred could tell you where it is located.</p>

120

<p>I can’t remember who referred to mantori.suzuki as “she” but I think mantori.suzuki is a guy.</p>