Some of these more regional schools taking B students from prep schools or wealthy NYC suburbs are making a strategic decision. Taking these kids raises the school’s profile with movers and shakers and helps create a national reputation. Elon is one such school, SMU is another.
USC a few decades ago used to have that reputation, but such a reputation was seen as negative, so it moved to upgrade its academic profile (initially offering lots of big scholarships for National Merit) and broaden its SES diversity.
High school C and D students who want to go to college, decades ago and now, go to community college, right?
I really have no definition of prestigious, which is why I generally use parentheses around that term. As far I wrote at the beginning of the thread (I think), prestige is in the eye of the beholder.
There are popular and less popular colleges, really, and colleges with wealthy students and colleges with students who are not as wealthy.
There were always colleges where the kids of the wealthy who would not be accepted to the more “Big Name” colleges would attend. That is why there are many colleges which are not considered “prestigious”, and have a median student family income in the top 5%.
I do not think that it was the C students from the “prestigious” prep schools who drove the rise of newly “prestigious” schools. It was the increasing number of A students who were applying to the older “prestigious” schools. This mass of high performing students, which was further inflated by the grade inflation in high income area schools, had no place in the older “prestigious” colleges, so started attending their second choices. As more of these students started attending these “second choice” schools, these schools started becoming “first choice” for subsequent cohorts of students. It started with “the other Ivies”, then to Stanford, UChicago, and Duke, then to the “other elite” colleges, like Vanderbilt, Georgetown, LACs like Williams and Amherst, etc. Among the “newly prestigious”, some became so popular that their acceptance rates dropped to, or below, those of the “older prestigious”, so Stanford, Vanderbilt, Duke, Pomona, UChicago, etc, have acceptance rates similar to those of the Ivies, with Stanford having the lowest acceptance rate of all colleges.
As late as the 1990s, UChicago was accepting 60% of applicants. It can definitely be considered a “newly prestigious” university, and it didn’t become more popular, and thus more “prestigious”, because wealthy kids from the East Coast who couldn’t get into Yale started attending UChicago in the early 2000s.
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ucbalumnus , High Point University says 80% of their students are from out of state on their website so not so sure about the numbers unless HPU is lying and not sure why they would: http://www.highpoint.edu/visitorinformation/school-profile/
HPU is not a very common destination for in-state students. I hear more NC students talking about wanting to go to Duke or Davidson or Wake Forest for private schools. Of course the vast majority go to one of the UNC system schools like UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, Appalachian State, UNC-Charlotte, etc.
@MWolf It’s likely also due to increasing #s of international students applying to the most selective schools, and especially for need-aware schools, they can be guaranteed sources of income (though Admissions likely controls for this by being able to access parent occupations, school resources etc. with need-blind domestic students—how else do all the need-blind T20s consistently limit ~1/2 their class as those receiving FA, and with likely consistent average FA packages/student?)
My pleasure.
I think the point is that while everyone generally agrees it is great to go a Brown or Stanford, it can also be great to go to Chapman or Connecticut College, or UTDallas or Miami Ohio.
There are two main reasons kids who might aspire to attend “elite/prestigious” unis do not attend. 1)Cost: The student is admitted but the family, while not poor, cannot afford the COA. 2)Stats: Whether by a lot or just a smidge, the student did not get accepted.
Instead of debating whether or not the top 20 schools are more usefully prestigious than the top 21-50, I’m more interested in a line of demarcation further into the weeds. The line of thinking brought up by @blossom @MWolf was very interesting, and I’d like to see others’ opinions.
This is all interesting to me in a popcorn munching detached sort of way.
And @blossom, what ARE those schools??? 
But even if you don’t want to mention them again (or PM me) I have a followup question. What would be the advantages/disadvantages of attending such a school for other students? I’m talking about the schools for the slacker scions who couldn’t get into top-40 or top50 schools? Let’s say a kid could get into a very respectable public or non-prestigious private, but chooses to attend this b-side new-prestige school. Should they? Why?
I hope HPU isn’t the sort of school that is a new-prestige school. I view HPU as an alternative to a midlevel public. Like say a wealthy private school kid can’t get into UNC or NCSU - maybe a parent decides HPU is a more acceptable option than Western Carolina or Campbell. BTW, I think WCU and Campbell are good options for the students that attend and are at least academically equal to HPU if not superior, but neither has the country club appointments of HPU.
I think Elon could have ended up like HPU, but the administration made a giant push during the 70s-90s to be a different sort of university. I think they succeeded and are going to move further in the right direction. Elon looks almost as pretty HPU, but the academics appear to be much better.
@blossom, I should be in the PM too. lol
Fifty years ago (I know because I was there), several Ivies were in the same position: Columbia was hemorrhaging faculty; Penn was still receiving allocations from the Pennsylvania state legislature; there was open speculation that Brown would go broke without big cuts to its budget. It’s no coincidence that NESCAC came into its own during the same period. IMHO, it took the dot.com bubble of the late 90’s for the “lower Ivies” to claw their way back to “prestigiosity”.
Given that most posters here don’t loath the idea of prestige this statement isn’t even true. Even in the distorted world that is this site.
EconPop, I don’t see HPU as an alternative to a mid-level public school in North Carolina. Maybe it’s an alternative to a mid-level public school up north, but not here. As I (and HPU) mentioned 80% of their students are from out of state. They are not trying to appeal to many students in NC. They seem to want the rich kids who went to prep school up north and are used to a country club environment. Definitely not an alternative to Western Carolina (mountain & country kids, or kids who need to take advantage of that amazing $500 tuition deal) or Campbell (religious conservatives). I think HPU is where wealthy students go for that Gentleman’s C. It is prestigious in the country club sense of prestigious (aka wealthy). My NC born-n-bred kids look at both Elon and HPU and say, why would anyone want to go to school in that town? There are many, many other more attractive towns in NC to base a college in.
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Other policies that can tip the FA-need of the admit class without looking at individual FA-need:
- How important factors like legacy, first generation, etc. are.
- What kind of extracurriculars are favored (e.g. preppy sports versus working to earn money to help support the family or working in the family small business).
- Whether non-custodial parent information is required for FA (if it is, it probably screens out almost half of FA-needy potential students).
- How many application items are required (more application items to keep track of => favors students in well-resourced high school with college counseling that helps them stay on the college admissions track).
- Use of recommendations, where recommenders at well-resourced high schools are more likely to have practice and coaching from dedicated college counselors.
- Use of interviews, where upper and upper-middle class applicants are likely to match mostly upper and upper-middle class alumni better than those from other SES class backgrounds.
A lot of kids from our high school (dfw suburb) go to SFA as well.
I agree.
What I was trying to say and failing to get across, was maybe NC students who end up at HPU would have ended up at those other schools if their parents were not wealthy.
I’ll stop from saying any more to not unintentionally step on any toes.
I think posters loath the idea that your list of prestige is not the same as theirs. I said many posts ago that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Prestige is a matter of perception and to me a great school and a prestigious school are not exactly the same thing.
I know a family from our area whose son wound up at High Point because it offered a lot of supportive services for the student.
There is a sub-set of people on this site for which this is true. But I don’t think its a majority. And if you step away from this site into the real world, its an amazingly small subset.
You also can’ really compare pre-common app admissions rates to what they are now. Back in the 1980s when I was applying to college you had to fill out paper application forms by hand. No one was shooting out 20 applications. Schools like UChicago were very self-selective. Top students searched them out.