How is a school's prestige defined?

I find it quite amusing that some of you are trying to analyze the selection of sexual partners using patterns and science.

@fractalmstr only on the internet can a discussion go from debating college prestige to marriage and attractiveness :))

Nothing compares to the scent of fresh-cut green tea.

Except the scent of rose petals.

It’s also pretty cheap.
Quite a bit cheaper than University of Utah for instate residents.
Not that prestigious among the faithful in my neck of the woods however.
But then Notre Dame isn’t either.

I think men & women are much more intelligent and complex than some give them credit for.
Can an actor who attended Columbia University, find happiness with a former professor who taught robotics and AI?

@emeraldkity4‌, is that an idea for a rom-com?

Could be I guess, but it was taken from the internets.
http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/01/joseph-gordon-levitt-is-now-a-trophy-husband.html

fractalmstr: I know a guy, with a PhD in demographics, who has spent large portions of a career now well into its fourth decade using data patterns and science to analyze people’s selection of partners, sexual and otherwise. It’s an actual field, now closely related to behavioral economics.

I married a Harvard grad because I met him at Harvard. We were both also Foreign Service brats. If I’d still been unattached in grad school, I’d have married someone from Columbia most likely.

As for who we play with. I can only think of one other Harvard couple in the area. So we have to make do with people who attended Sarah Lawrence, Rutgers, RPI, U of Mysore (PhD from U of Windsor, Canada), and even a couple that never attended college at all, but are among the smartest people I’ve met.


[QUOTE=""]
People also choose their mates based on physical attractiveness.

[/QUOTE]

LOL, Sally.

Reminded me of a quip on Dickinson’s “The soul selects her own society” - but the bodies are thrown together based on physical attraction.

I understand that this is an area of serious research for people. I just think it’s a little amusing, that’s all… sort of like if someone were to research the optimal way to have sex for peak pleasure and maximum efficiency. Lol.

One important point is that prestige varies quite a bit regionally. I’m in northern Illinois, so the close schools like the University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and University of Wisconsin at Madison have more prestige in the immediate area than many schools that may be farther away and academically superior. These schools have more prestige just because a lot of the better students in this area have gone to them. They are all some of the top schools in the world regardless, but someone from my area is less likely to have heard of Amherst, Brown, Cornell, Berkeley and other similarly ‘ranked’ schools. People around here do know the bigger names though, like Stanford, Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc, even though most of the people here wouldn’t really be able to say -why- the HYPSM schools are so good.