@skate17: Be an independent and critical thinker. Why not create your own [color=blue]T20/color based on your own observations, factors of evaluation and methodology? You may be surprised your list is quite different from other known rankings.
Quotes from Angel Chernoff in the 18 Important Reminders About Living Up to People’s Expectations
“Your needs matter. Don’t ignore them. Sometimes you have to do what’s best for you and your life, not what’s best for everyone else.”
“Rather than being confined by opinions, you need to create your own reality.”
Here’s how I think about it. Each college is a community and an institution with its own personality, its own strengths and weaknesses, and its own charms. They’re kind of like people you don’t know yet, only a very few of whom are famous.
When you want to get into a relationship, it might seem at first as if no regular person could possibly measure up to the famous people you feel like you “know” from TV and in movies. People you haven’t heard of before don’t seem all that special until you get to know them, and they don’t come with the ego-boost of dating someone famous. But once you start getting to know people, you’re likely to find friends and even romantic partners that are amazing and turn out to be all you ever hoped for.
In my view, not being able to see the charms of any colleges but the handful of most-famous ones is like refusing to date at all unless you can date a celebrity. (And sometimes the truth is that you’d be far better off with a regular person!)
Some super advice in the above posts, so I am going to come at it from the angle that matters a lot for the next 10 months- and won’t matter even a tiny bit after that: your school/home environment.
The pressure in academically competitive private high schools senior year builds as the senior class moves from ‘where are you applying’ to ‘did you hear where X got in?!’ to ‘where did you get in’. Give yourself a gift and from this moment forward tell no-one except 1 or 2 best best best super-trustworthy buddies where your heart is. Treat EVERYBODY else to a rolling series of “I’m not sure where I’m applying / where I want to go” replies, continuously introducing a wide range of colleges as ones you are considering.
Use the advice above to do homework on less-familiar schools that are a good fit for you, and/or have some element that is genuinely interesting to you. Each time you find one talk about it with friends and family.
Example: you might be interested in pre-med. URichmond has a program for pre-med students in which you get EMT certified and work as an EMT as an undergraduate. The program provides the community with a steady stream of really motivated EMT’s, give students real hands-on medical experience, and gets a lot of the pre-med boxes ticked. The med school acceptance rate for those students is impressive. So, you tell friends & family about it (‘look at this great program I’m interested in’). A week or two later, you have another great program that you are talking about. Everybody who asks what your first choice is or where you are applying gets told the same thing: I’m considering a lot of places / I don’t really have a first choice. Set it on repeat, so that it comes out automatically. I know students who have done this all the way to May, until they have put their deposit down, and had both a collegekid and a gradschoolkid who successfully pulled it off this year. It makes for a much happier senior year, b/c you really start getting into it.
Use this process to build your list of colleges that you are applying to- it will help you with your ‘why us’ essays (including safeties & matches) and it will help you find programs that you can legitimately love.
With 75% of your class going to one of 2 state schools, and many/most of the rest going to maybe 10-20 other schools (that I bet most CCers would recognize as ‘usual suspects’), finding some wild cards- schools that don’t fit in the usual boxes in your school- can give you a place to call your own.
Consider the post-college goal: gainful employment.
If you plan to have a fulfilling career one day, focus on how you will achieve that. I can tell you that what you end up doing in life is far more dependent on who you are as a person than what college you go to. Perhaps a prestigious college can crack open a door, but getting into the building is on you.
I’ll give you a good demonstration of this. A good friend’s child just graduated from HYP and is unable to find a job. (There are, of course, plenty of HYP grads that do have jobs.) I know another student who just graduated from a well-regarded but not tippy top LAC, and was set to start a job along with graduates from HYP. This job was going to pay nearly six figures.
That student will no longer being starting the highly paid job because she found a better job for her. This same student also has been working a good summer job doing meaningful work, which is relevant to her future career goals. Three jobs during a major economic crisis, versus no job. This illustrates that it’s probably the person, far more than the school, that makes the difference.
I know incredibly successful people who didn’t attend prestigious colleges. It’s down to an individual making the most of opportunities.
Identify your own criteria and then make a list that meets them. If you want to include Prestige or USNWR in column J go ahead, but once you have a few programs prioritized, filter out some geographic non-starters and then add in the NPC results you’re not going to be all that interested in The Rankings.
I really like the idea of finding programs that suit your needs (UofMN 3+4 pre-admit MD for example) as a way to put particulars above generalizations. Make your list about your needs rather than what everyone else is chasing. Scholarship money or honors programs are other great ways to say “This entrepreneur program is better than that national ranking for me.” Also, money concerns are real so taking a step down in prestige to get a bigger pile of merit money can be something to embrace. (“I’m getting a great deal from St Endowment College, just too much to turn down.”
What is interesting in this list of where CEOs went to college is that the undergraduate degree is likely to be the one that is not an elite school but if they have a graduate degree they all went to prestigious graduate institutions.
@GlobalFencingMom , I would argue that the grad school attended was not the key to their success. After all, there are many grads from those colleges who don’t head up famous companies. Also, I see a bunch of not-household name grad schools in that list: U Oklahoma, Illinois State, U Tulsa, U Pitt.
Look, at the end of the day less than 1% of the student population will ever be a CEO, so who really cares where they went to college, it’s not a good representation of the typical student.
What’s most important for the majority of college students is “what type of undergrad education will you actually get” and which ones are the “best fit” which in my definition is is three-pronged: academically, financially, and socially. There is nothing wrong with wanting to challenge yourself and go the “best fit” college that you can get into. It may be T20 or it may not be. It’s important to understand what colleges are the best for YOU academically (e.g. has strong program in your major). I know a lot of students who were top students in HS who did not apply to any of the ivies (as what they had to offer, wasn’t what they were looking for in a college). And that is ok.
At the end of the day you need to really research the colleges that you will be applying to as they are all different and have different specialties/programs and should be a good mix of reach, match, and safety colleges that you would be happy to attend.
@Lindagaf I am sure there were many things that contributed to their success, I just found it interesting to see that the prestige names popped up more regularly as their grad school rather than their undergraduate school.
All things equal, prestige is that extra. So, of course you want it. Most of us do. But cost, opportunities, and availability are what take it off many lists. Many are happy to pay the extra cost, but you still have to have the acceptance for it to be a viable option and due to selectivity, most are not going to have it as a choice.
Also, when you do research for what’s available without the prestige, which too many folks do not do, sometimes you get more going to a less prestigious school. There are programs that can fit career goals better and quicker at some local schools with little name recognition. I know a number of students who gave up HPY to get into undergrad/Med school programs, for instance. Those aren’t the only programs that give a pause to balancing prestige against pragmatism
This is well put. I agree that it’s a trait for consideration. A nice to have, if you get it. The breakdown happens when it becomes the consuming factor, rather than fit (personality, activities, intended major, campus type, setting, social environment, etc.).
Prestige is also in the eye of the beholder. In many places, a state flagship will have more prestige than most Ivies - ask people in Cincinnati whether they think that Brown or OSU is more prestigious, and the winner is not going to be the Ivy League college. Within a field prestige will also differ, so a BS from CMU will provide more prestige for a CS graduate than a BS from Harvard, and NASA will consider an engineering degree from Purdue to be more prestigious than one from Yale.
Yes, but “prestige” doesn’t operate in a vacuum. These colleges became “prestigious” for a reason. They have many factors that are desirable such as world-class faculty and programs; very smart student peers; small faculty to student ratio; excellent alumni network and connected people; sizable endowments; larger percentage of students across the U.S. and the world; and top notch recruiting on and off campus.
“Prestige” can give you much more than just a name on your college diploma.
We want what we don’t think we can have. I was accepted ED to Columbia University this year. If you had told me that last summer, I would have probably cried with joy. I had been so stressed about getting into a ‘good’ college throughout the summer and fall that I was convinced that if I could just get into this school, everything would work out.
In reality, it may be hard to consider this now (it certaintly was for me), but getting into the dream school won’t fix your problems. The stress you’ve felt for months on end about college applications doesn’t go away. It just gets funnelled somewhere else. It’s very easy to think we need something, when in reality, it makes our lives no better. Frequently after I was accepted to Columbia, I thought about if I had gotten rejected and ended up going somewhere like Syracuse, and the fact that I probably would have been just as happy, or even more so, had I gone to that school.
As a final thought. I suggest taking a really long and hard look at if an elite, ‘prestigious,’ school is what you want. You have to really love learning and school, and working hard, and stress. If you’re the type of person that can feel reward from working hours on end to create something great, then great. If that seems like something that would make you overly stressed and unhappy, please don’t. There is no reason to go to a T20 just for the name.
Some really really thoughtful responses here. I hope something clicks for you b/c getting out of the prestige mindset can make you so much happier, less stressed. Not just during college app/admissions but the rest of your life. Make happiness your goal, not achievement for its own sake.
Make fulfillment your goal. Chase happiness and you won’t be happy. Same with prestige. Work to achieve for a cause you believe in. Find a purpose for living. On your death bed, you yourself won’t care what college you went to. What you will care about would be the impact you had on other people.
With nearly any purchase you make there are 2 considerations. First is function. What do need the product or service to do. For colleges this can also include things such as environment, size, areas of strength, majors, etc. The second is how does it make you feel. Marketers love the second because it’s easier to sell a feeling than function. It’s also where things can get expensive. Functionally all else being equal a Mercedes and a Honda are pretty equal but people are willing to pay a lot more for how the Mercedes makes them “feel”. I consider college the vehicle not the destination. Focus on what you want to accomplish at a university and not how you want it to make you feel (once you start it won’t). Getting into a university, any university is just the beginning. From here your success is up to you.
Each time someone brings up US News Rankings, make the comment that the criteria being used is not meaningful and the rankings, themselves, are laughable.