How is a school's prestige defined?

Parents Forum
201

“But that brings up a point that regionally, say in Washington state, a degree from WSU, UW or WWU, may get you many more job offers than say, Williams, Univ of Mchigan or Georgetown.”

Sure. But if you want a job in DC or Philly or NYC or Chicago, talking about “U Dub” is going to get you a lot of blank stares. Schools that are at the very top of the prestige heap will work in lots of places in lots of different regions. That is a very typical pattern you see in law firm hiring.

All the swanky law firms in any particular city will recruit/hire students from the exact same T14 national schools. But then that firm (or that particular office of that firm) will also recruit at the local law schools too. Since those local schools will be a little lower on the prestige scale, the firms will require applicants from the local schools to be higher ranked (class ranking being yet another “signaling device”).

A top 10% student from Fordham Law can get hired at most swanky NY law firms. But that student will have a tough time getting a job in Chicago or LA. Even at the Chicago or LA office of the exact same firm that would hire them in NY.

But top 50% from Harvard Law is a strong signal everywhere. Because Harvard Law is very selective/prestigious.

202

Working for a " prestigious" law firm on the east coast, is not what anyone I know is interested in.
It seems pretty safe & mundane.
Think out of the box.

203

@northwesty: The brand of an MBA or JD (and, IMO, more so the network) does matter in many industries that the top MBA’s and JD’s enter.

However, whether and how the prestige of your undergrad matters is dependent on context to a larger extent because undergrads tend to head off to a much more diverse set of pursuits.

BTW, anyone on here who went to b-school understands how signalling works, so you don’t have to explain it again and again. If you did go to b-school, though, you’ll realize that while the profs spin nice theories, and some of them are insightful and useful, sometimes they have little clue how the real world actually works. Suffice it to say that the predominant reasons for why most firms decide to hire someone or not are not tied to the signalling aspect of a person’s education.

204

“A top 10% student from Fordham Law can get hired at most swanky NY law firms. But that student will have a tough time getting a job in Chicago or LA. Even at the Chicago or LA office of the exact same firm that would hire them in NY.”

What’s so prestigious about being a lawyer? Even at a swanky NY firm.

205

BTW, you keep harping on selectivity, but UChicago was respected as an intellectual powerhouse (and so were its grads) even back when its acceptance rate was above 50%. Your retort to the above was that selectivity isn’t acceptance rate.

You seem to think that selectivity is tied to USNews rankings, but if a college doubled its endowment or doubled its faculty with no other changes, its USN ranking would go up. While that may very well improve a college, most people would not say that those moves increased its selectivity if its acceptance rate doesn’t change.

So what is selectivity according to you, then, @northwesty?

206

Well, glad some humor is coming out. Cuz a lot of this is much ado.

But [the degree] does say something about you – that you are smart, hard-workng, etc Well, ok, we know that getting into Harvard is tough and they like smart, hard-working kids.

But this part drives me batty *-- and therefore are desire-able as a potential employee, friend, significant other, etc. * I’m laughing, wanting to ask “Know many people?” or “Get around much?” I’m dis-impressed with the sorts who assume an elite degree makes someone more desirable as a friend or SO. C’mon, what sort of people are these and do we care that they’re looking for an Ivy spouse?? Sounds to me like they’re missing a big chunk of the picture. Eek.

207

Fwiw, I know a Harvard MBA who (it was revealed later) sexually molested his young, adopted daughter. So BFD he went to Harvard.

I love elite schools. I do. But they are not heaven on earth. They are places filled with people and like any set of people some are good and some are bad.

208

@lookingforward‌, you are obviously unaware that before going to HYPSM, your st stinks like any other person, but once you matriculate at one of those places, your st starts smelling as sweet as rose petals, garnering you employers, friends, and the attraction of members of the opposite sex (go to another Ivy/equivalent, and your s**t starts to smell like fresh-cut green tea).

209

LOL, yeah those ivy grads are all soooo smart & hard-working…

Thomas Gilbert, Sr., founder of Wainscott Capital hedgefund, murdered by his son
http://abcnews.go.com/US/hedge-fund-founder-thomas-gilbert-srs-death-staged/story?id=28007547

Why is a 30 yr old man with a Deerfield & Princeton pedigree and with insider connections on Wall Street, living off of mummy & daddy?

210

GMT, I have to admit that I immediately thought of this thread when I saw this news on the Today Show this morning.

211

^^ Ha, I was careful to refer to admissions, not grads.

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When it comes to college, there is often significant overlap in various prestige factors – endowment, age, sterling faculty, reputation, wealthy/famous alumni and student selectivity. Harvard and Yale have all of those in spades. As others have noted, Yale always gets ranked highly because most ranking systems are basically measuring “Yale-ness.”

Not every school has every factor. Chicago and Stanford are relatively young for example.

I’m not saying that anyone should live their life based on prestige. It’s a free country, do what you want and what you think will make you happy. But if you are indifferent to what prestige is and how it works, then why are you reading this right now?

But the OP asked about prestige (which is a perception of quality and achievement in the eyes of others) and what determines it. I think it is mostly (mostly not entirely) derived from selectivity – basically a place that only a very few can gain entry to. You could use elitist as a synonym for selective if you want. US News’ top rankings just for selectivity are HYPS, Caltech, MIT, Chicago, Columbia and Wash U. Not a perfect list – Wash U and Caltech don’t have the recognized brands that HYPS do. But pretty good.

Compare that to the overall endowment list – HYPS and MIT (which all overlap with selectivity) but then also Texas, TAMU and UM. Not quite as good a list. Endowment on a per student basis gives a pretty good list – HYPS and MIT. And LACs Amherst, Williams and Swarthmore (which are also very selective).

You get mostly similar lists if you look at the US News ranks for peer assessment. HPYS and MIT are tops. Wash U is strong, but not quite as strong. For LACs, Amherst, Williams and Swarthmore.

If you are familiar with the legal industry (which I am), you can look at that as perhaps the purest actual operation of how prestige for academic degrees works. Not saying it is good or bad, but just that that’s how it works. Ultimately, the prestige of your law degree doesn’t determine you legal career success, but it absolutely has an effect on the path that your career follows (for better or worse). The market for college degrees is much larger and heterogeneous. So the college prestige market isn’t as much a pure play as the legal industry or Wall Street. But similar forces at work.

213

“But this part drives me batty – and therefore are desire-able as a potential employee, friend, significant other, etc. I’m laughing, wanting to ask “Know many people?” or “Get around much?” I’m dis-impressed with the sorts who assume an elite degree makes someone more desirable as a friend or SO.”

Seriously? Of course this happens constantly. For example, does your spouse have a college degree?

65% of college educated women marry a guy who is a college grad. 78% of college educated men marry a gal who is a college grad. If you’ve graduated from college, you basically write off the two-thirds of the members of the opposite sex as possible future spouses who didn’t go to college. If you are smart and successful and ambitious, you probably are looking for someone who shares those traits. And having good economic prospects doesn’t hurt either. Studies show that men and women both are surprisingly sensitive to the concept of “marrying down”.

There’s lots of people out there to date, so singles (just like employers) use filters and signaling devices to hone in on which prospects to focus on. The dating market is complex, but it is a market.

214

Actually, northwesty – and I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate here, rather than being argumentative – I believe that informal surveys – if not “studies”-- have shown that many marriages are about “trades.” IOW, each partner, if not “ideally” aligned or “equated” on every measure, is trading down in some areas, up in some areas, and equating in some areas. Thus, one might be marrying a “lesser” in terms of income potential but a “greater” in some important aspect of the alliance, such as social ease, family relationships, many other factors. But yes, there are certain “minimums” without which a marriage or even dating would be unlikely.

215

The dating market is much more complex than your analysis suggests. Religious factors, ethnic, gender norms in certain cultural upbringings, etc. all trump tiny differences in “prestige” vis a vis “marrying down”. If I’m a committed Catholic, I’d rather that my son marry a woman who shares those values even if she graduated from Fairfield or Villanova vs. Harvard or Yale but is not a practicing Catholic. Relative differences in the prestige of the college are SO MUCH LESS IMPORTANT in the marriage market. Notre Dame and Providence College- who the heck cares about US News? They are equally prestigious for families who care about the “signalling” effect of a Catholic education.

Ditto for observant Jews, traditional Hindu and Muslim families, etc.

And for families without strong religious affiliations, there are other factors at work in the marriage market which also push the prestige factor of college down to the bottom of the barrel. Military families; Southern communities with a strong culture (and by the way, families there who live or die by Auburn, U Mississippi, etc, who cares about rankings?).

216

I know there are Carolina households where if the daughter came home for a visit accompanied by a young man wearing a Duke sweatshirt and carrying a copy of the US News rankings, the dad would roll up that magazine and swat the guy right out of the house.

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blossom, I agree that marriage decisions are complex. Were you replying to me or to someone else? Because I’m not arguing against what you are asserting. I was replying to northwesty, actually.

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Blossom – I said the dating/marriage market is complex. But you actually make my point quite well.

If you are a committed Catholic, then you are quite likely to have attended a Catholic college yourself and also likely to wind up with someone who also went to a Catholic college. So the Catholic college degree turns out to be a very strong signal/filter for you.

If you are a Harvard grad, it is not surprising that the signal that degree sends out might be more likely to be picked up by someone else with a similar signal. That doesn’t necessarily mean you require your future spouse to be a HYPS grad, but that might well happen. It is pretty likely that your spouse will turn out to have some level of academic distinction at the college or higher level. Extremely unlikely your spouse will not have a college degree. Which is 2/3rds of the population.

219

Epiphany I was responding to Northwesty as well.

Northwesty- you are taking a tertiary consideration in the marital market (the “prestige” factor) and turning it into something more important than it is.

All things being equal I agree that college grads tend to marry other college grads (but even there, a lot of slippage). That doesn’t mean that the U Penn vs. Penn State debate (which fascinates folks on CC but bores the pants off of anyone in real life) is at all relevant.

See my point?

You have taken an argument that prestige is important sometimes and in some places (I agree- and the legal employment market is a nice example of that) and tried to extrapolate it beyond its useful or logical boundary. You aren’t getting hired by Wachtell if you graduated in the bottom third of your class at Suffolk Law School, but that doesn’t mean that anyone beyond the AmLaw 50 and the Federal Judiciary and the AG’s offices (and a couple of boutique appellate firms that nobody has heard of beyond the Supreme Court) gives a hoot about law school prestige. The wealthiest person in my city is likely a personal injury lawyer who graduated from a “huh? Where is that?” law school and got lucky with asbestos back in the 1990’s. Brilliant guy by the way.

But I digress.

Stick to your argument that there are some pockets of the economy and society that care about prestige. Done. And leave it at that.

220

Oh, please. The dating market sorts itself by “academic distinction”? Seriously?! Who even ever TALKS about that kind of thing in real life? How would this work, exactly? Let’s see…

“Hey, can I buy you a drink?”

“No, thanks–I’m with my friends/already have a boyfriend/just don’t find you attractive/saw you staring at other girls’ butts.”

“Do you realize you are turning down a martini from a guy who graduated Magma cum Lava from FancyPants University?”

“Oh, well, in that case…!”