That depends- and YMMV as always. Temple- has some other strong departments. Stonehill- ditto. BYU has strengths as a university apart from the cultural advantages that the LDS upbringing offers. Etc. Is your question “Is my kid’s life over if he/she attends a college nobody has ever heard of, and majors in a marginal program at said college” the answer is no- but your kid WILL need to be more proactive than others in order to launch. Or get really lucky which happens- but is not a strategy.
But majoring in a marginal department does bring some challenges. Blossom’s advice would be DON’T major in chemistry at a college with a fine School of Education where the chemistry majors go on to teach HS chemistry if you don’t want to teach. It is going to be harder to seek out other opportunities in chemistry. The program is likely designed for Ed majors who want to teach science, not for Chem majors who are likely interested in grad school or industry.
Is this your question??? Not every college is a reasonable substitute for every other college. If you want to major in French Lit, you need more than just three advanced French classes. If you want to major in Urban Planning, that’s an interdisciplinary topic which will require a robust faculty to teach it effectively.
For a kid who is undecided- there’s a reason why a comprehensive U with tons of courses and faculty and more areas to explore than you could possible fit into four years ends up being a terrific choice.
I know a young guy who graduated a few years ago with a degree in Media Studies from a college nobody has ever heard of outside the area where the college is located. So it’s not Emerson, Fordham, USC, any of the “famous” programs. He put together his own major by cutting and pasting. He has had a tough, tough time of it. He’s been trying to launch into an industry which is fiercely competitive from the git-go, AND doesn’t have many of the experiences that his peers from the better known programs have on their resumes- summer jobs at a local TV station doing production and maintaining equipment and filling in when someone was on vacation, internships for one of the major networks, etc. This college does not have the resources that the famous schools have- state of the art equipment to learn your trade at the campus production center, faculty with connections and the ability to “make a phone call” when needed, etc. AND- career services at this college is very focused on kids who want jobs in accounting and K-12 teaching. So they have been pretty useless.
Sometimes going to a place with better resources is the right decision…
You can also look at things like retention rates, graduation rates, and ask schools for outcomes reports - they do provide this data - to see how many of their graduates are full time employed, in grad school, still looking, etc.
I’m not sure if this is exactly on topic. Do you choose the more highly regarded program or the more highly regarded school? For example, using Oregon vs. OSU computer science. Oregon is more highly regarded overall, and OSU CS ranked higher. UNC vs. NC State engineering is a more well-known example of this.
You bring up a good point here: a lot of “no-name” schools are known for excellence in some niche majors. Heck, I got my master’s at one of them – Belmont – a school known for music business nationally and nursing in and around Nashville.
Not every school can be Cal-Berkeley or Michigan or Stanford, offering a hundred majors that are all ranked top-20 in the country. But even the less-known schools tend to have at least one calling card.
I believe it is all regional. Here in Texas, everyone has heard of the big SEC schools and Ivys. However, through personal experience and observing the experiences of my nieces and nephews who are in college or have graduated, going to school in Texas gives you an edge if you live in state. That is especially true for getting summer internships in Texas. I have a degree from Johns Hopkins, but it’s my graduate degree from the University of Texas Health sciences that seems to capture employer attention. It’s as if my Hopkins degree was not worth it for this part of the country. I’m not saying they don’t care, it just appears that there seems to be more affection towards the Texas schools, particularly in Texas.
Agree. Desert- are you a fan of Butler? You would be if you lived in Indiana.
One deviation that I’ve observed- the Catholic U’s punch above their weight nationally, I think because if a kid is at a parochial school, wants a Catholic U, and can’t get into Notre Dame, Georgetown or BC, schools like Providence or Seton Hall are terrific options, regardless of your region. And in the surveys that are done periodically to assess “strength of alumni network”, Holy Cross and Notre Dame regularly come up in the top tier-- in the same category as SMU (loyal alums to an astonishing degree).
Interesting to see the mentions of Stonehill, which I’d never heard of (grew up in NYC) until my twin nieces who grew up in a Massachusetts suburb of Providence went there. They graduated three years ago. One did indeed major in accounting, and is a successful accountant with a big firm in Boston now; the other is a schoolteacher. They were also competitive high jumpers. Stonehill turned out to be pretty much the perfect school for them.
My S22 will be going to NYU, which has no questions about its national/international name recognition. A friend of his, who wants to be an architect, is excited about UNC Charlotte and will probably go there, pending financial-aid results.
If you are wanting to major in Engineering you go to NC State since UNC doesn’t have a straight engineering major. If it’s computer science of some stripe I think both are fine and both have good name recognition. If it’s NCSU or UNC vs Catawba College for CS then yes I think State or UNC would give you a leg up in NC and nationally over Catawba.
I was responding to the OP’s later introduction of specific colleges, but sure. In general, fit with the specific student is always going to be most important. If the best fit is a school with low name recognition in his or her desired field, then the student is going to have to have other factors that help him or her to stand out.
I think part of the OPs question is, are they really. Are you guaranteed a better education at highly ranked, very recognized schools. Our son took the opposite approach. He avoided schools with large lectures. I think the jury is out. I see much more evidence that a students success is based on their HS performance than it is on their choice of undergraduate institution, within reason. I guess the question is, which schools are SO bad as to be avoided? I doubt many of us have heard of them. They aren’t the ones typically discussed on CC.
Large national employers looking for candidates in specific areas know where to find their candidates. Small highly (extremely?) selective/competitive employers tend to focus on a few schools where they know they can find their candidates. Local employers tend to find their candidates locally because they are more familiar with local schools and they tend to have employees who are alumni of these schools. Where name recognition helps is if your skills are more general and you’re competing for positions that aren’t local with others with similar background but from more recognizable or better regarded colleges.
It’s difficult to rank undergrad programs, you’re right. It seems that, generally, undergrad program rankings are usually based, in whole or in part, on grad/PhD program prestige and output.
That being the presumption, the challenge is to figure out how much of that grad/PhD program quality seeps down to the undergrads.
To take your original questions, I am not a job recruiter, so I am just approaching this as a mom. My D22 is planning to attend a lesser known college and only applied to mainly regional and lesser known colleges, but I felt like they all had good things going for them and am happy with where she applied. She applied and plans to go to Warren Wilson College (very small, one of the work colleges) and also applied to Hollins, Agnes Scott, UNC-Greensboro, and UNC-Asheville. Right now she is planning on majoring in Creative Writing/English, and may go onto grad school after. She doesn’t have a clear picture of what kind of job-of-work-for-money she wants, but knows she wants to write. She could end up working in publishing (have a few acquaintances that do that) or in Library Science or something else entirely that she falls in love with.
I think so much of this depends on the field they go into. If they are looking to go into education or nursing I think anywhere you can get the degree and pass the credentials is fine. If they want to go into something that is more competitive then name recognition might matter, but it really just depends. Even though I said that I didn’t like Catawba or Wingate that much, they produced a Governor and a Senator respectively.
When I was looking for schools for D22 since she was focused on Creative Writing and English I searched on schools that had good reps for those programs. I just googled a lot and looked on CC and I found schools like Knox College and Cornell College (in Iowa) and Centre College. I don’t know how well those schools are known outside of their regions, but I was also not focused on name recognition. Ultimately she didn’t end up applying to those schools, but I felt like they were worth looking at. There are rankings (USNews and plenty of other too) for programs like the top schools for creative writing or whatever.
I guess the USNews list is one place to start. Also Google. You can see how many times it comes back in search engine results. That can get you a basic quantitative result for a start and then you can see news articles about the school. The school’s website can be helpful, but, of course, they are going to say that it’s great.
I think the school’s placement services are much more important. A school like Hollins or Agnes Scott will do a lot to get their students internships that lead to jobs.
And their focus is based on confirmation bias. If they’ve had previously solid employees, they tend to go back to the well. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t get very good employees elsewhere. They’re just trying to hedge their bets, maybe to their detriment.
Recruiting is an ROI function (like everything else in a business.) Boiling the ocean to find 10 new hires is insane- and probably gets the head of sourcing fired. Recruiters focus on schools where they’ve had good results isn’t “detrimental”- it’s critical to a successful recruiting season which needs to find the best possible candidates without spending millions of dollars that aren’t necessary, spreading your resources too thin, etc.
Back in the day when recruiting teams flew around the country- why would I send a team to U Montana or Wyoming to hire the 1 or 2 seniors who would be interested in a pharma manufacturing job outside of Boston when I could recruit at U Mass, BU and Olin and have kids lined up at our booth 20 thick?
This isn’t confirmation bias- this is dollars and cents. I’m going to bet you have never tried to develop and get a recruiting budget approved!
@blossom is exactly right. These are relatively small firms. They may have the financial resource but they simply don’t have the bodies to cast a wider net. And they don’t need to. They only hire a small number of candidates. The ones that I’m familiar with have stringent processes with both technical and cognitive interviews and/or tests, so they don’t hire based on the names of the colleges.
I agree wholeheartedly. When I say “to their detriment” I mean that they might miss out on even better candidates, or better programs to recruit at.
With their current approach, they are guaranteed to get candidates that are “good enough” and that’s…good enough. It doesn’t mean though that school X produces the “best” candidates. Given the logistics and financial implications that would create, it’s completely understandable that companies have pet school and don’t cast wider nets.
Detriment was the wrong word, because getting a “good enough” candidate, isn’t detrimental.
I appreciate the feedback. It seemsthat if one has an idea of what to study, then going to a school known for that field is a solid bet (assuming, of course, one doesn’t change majors). If one is undecided, then it behooves one to go to an institution with adequate depth and career placement services with at least regional name recognition.
But @blossom questioned whether it was worth attending a school where one’s major is a “marginal” department. My question then goes to figuring out, how does one tell if a program is marginal? I doubt a foreign language major could be had with only 3 advanced classes. Or if someone went into engineering, how much space is there really for engineering electives once the ABET curriculum is completed?
And @eyemgh is perhaps getting to the heart of the matter, how do we tell which schools are SO bad that they’re not worth attending? Because when people talk about finding the right fit and digging beneath the surface, there are quality schools that are little known and there are schools that don’t provide the quality we would hope for a postsecondary education to provide.
The Colleges That Change Lives list is great (and 2 of its institutions are on the sample list above), but I would imagine that there have to be other schools that meet the CTCL principles that aren’t listed as among the 40 on the website. Hasn’t the CTCL also been updated and had the roster of 40 change? What about schools that previously made the list or would be contenders to make the list in the future?
And part of it also comes to affordability. Almost all of the private colleges on this list have an average cost below $30,000 for families earning $110,000 or more. So if a family’s in-state public schools aren’t the right fit (or additional options are desired) then schools of this caliber might be contenders, but only if the education is worthwhile.