<p>DunninLA - I would consider all the schools you listed in your Tiers 1-2-3 to be one tier, and the decision between any of them to be made on personal fit/preference (or finances, if relevant). I think it is beyond goofy to slice that tier so narrowly.</p>
<p>and Harvard isn’t in a tier by itself</p>
<p>I think it is. It is silly to recommend a prospective student to choose JHU over Columbia if he/she is interested in become an investment banker. It is silly to recommend a prospective student to choose Northwestern over MIT if he/she is interested in becoming a Mathematics professor. It is silly to recommend a prospective student to choose Michigan over WashU if he/she is interested in going to medical school and becoming a doctor.</p>
<p>I could go on an on. Prestige matters.</p>
<p>I think the tiers can be broken down further:</p>
<p>Tier 1: Harvard
Tier 2: Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Caltech
Tier 3: the rest of the Ivies besides Cornell, Duke, University of Chicago
Tier 4: the rest of the top 25 schools
Tier 5: 26-50
Tier 6: 51-100</p>
<p>Of course it’s not in a tier by itself. And good grief, vengasso, grownups don’t think like that. Really, life isn’t as ordinal as you make it.</p>
<p>The issue with tiers is that we’d keep </p>
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<p>No, people don’t pick schools just based on how much recruiting there is (by the way, both JHU and Columbia are recruited, there’s just less interest in finance at JHU). If that were the case, NYU would be top tier and Penn would be up there with Harvard.</p>
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<p>Vengasso, are you a high school senior in India, by any chance? Because the only one of these I’d agree with is the first. There’s no reason someone at NU couldn’t easily become a mathematics professor, and there’s no reason someone at Michigan couldn’t easily go to medical school. (BTW, it amuses me to no end how people think “doctors” all had to have gone to elite undergrads. You know, every small town in the US has doctors, open the phone book in any city and you’ll see hundreds … and we’re supposed to think they all went to the top 20 or so schools? It’s a complete lack of critical thinking skills here.)</p>
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<p>Selectivity merely reflects popularity among hs seniors, which is to say it reflects nothing meaningful at all, since hs seniors are notoriously driven by poor factors in selecting colleges to apply to (overinflated ideas of “prestige” that nerdy students reinforce with one another).</p>
<p>Malcolm Gladwell had a very interesting article in The New Yorker earlier this year that went into great depth about how poorly the rankings were done. Very interesting stuff whether you agree with it or not. I’m a lumper, not a splitter. 1 isn’t better than 10 or even 20 but 20 is probably better than 125. That’s just my opinion.</p>
<p>To the OP: Fordham is a great school. I know a handful of people who went there and loved it, though none of them were science folk. Still, it’s a good school in a great city and would probs be an amazing experience. Of course, Kansas State is a terrific pre-vet school!</p>
<p>To Vengasso: OMG. You poor, misguided soul. You will fit in well here on CC. Can everyone on CC agree that the Chairman of the Dept. of Surgery at Stanford is probably a pretty rocking doc? Successful, prestigious, yadda,yadda,yadda? His name is Tom Krummel – look him up. His educational pedigree is not CC approved - UWisc Parkside for undergrad ( usnwr #576) and Med Coll of Wisc for med school --how utterly plebian! The worry that goes into the rankings is astounding. I’ve heard from enough people outside of CC that it does matter in Wall Street I-Banking, but probably not so much in most other fields of endeavor. Who you are and what you can do matters more in those instances, kind of like it ought to.</p>
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<p>Which was exactly my point. As an aside, a gentleman told me this weekend that his daughter, a 2011 graduate of Northwestern (in DunninLA’s tier 3!), told him that the classes at NU were less challenging than the classes in her high school (admittedly a rigorous and selective enrollment high school). So much for selectivity - and ranking in general - as an indicator of the quality of education. Not to mention the interesting tidbit in sidelines’s post 28.</p>
<p>OP, in my opinion it isn’t the rank as much as the name recognition. People will respect a college they’ve heard of, and will admire it if they’ve heard good things about it. You are going to get more of a reaction using the name Princeton than Swarthmore and more Swarthmore than Lafayette, and more Lafayette than D’youville. These are not exact examples but I think you get the gist.</p>
<p>The ranking on the school itself does not speak for itself. But the ranking and name of the school correlate to who the person is. It is just four years of their life, yes, but it is the summation of the first 22. Your college is who you are. People don’t run around saying “Oh, typical Harvard student” or “Typical NYU student” without implying that there is a stereotype there. </p>
<p>Granted, there are some people who beat out the name of their crappy state school, but those are a dime a dozen. </p>
<p>(PS, Malcolm Gladwell is a silly citation. He’s the king of pop-psychology. Take everything with a grain of salt.)</p>
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<p>While you’re in college, perhaps. Later, not even.</p>