I understand that the ivies would be considered more prestigious to most, but are ivies truly better than top tier public schools?
It depends on what you want to study. UCB and UCLA are better in engineering than most schools in the Ivy League.
@whatisyourquest I was thinking business, political science, psychology, cognitive psych and others like that
In a word…no.
Depends on which “Ivy” you’re talking about. Harvard would be hard to beat…but a few of the other Ivies rank far below Berkely and UCLA in national and world rankings.
@MaryGJ I would agree with you. They seem like an outrageous amount of money and stress just for the “prestigious” Ivy name. The more I research the ivies the less I want to go to them.
Oh, I’d go to Harvard in a heartbeat. But Dartmouth and Brown…meh. I’d rather go to a top ranked public school, or MIT, or Stanford, or John Hopkins…or several other better schools.
Matthew, the best thing to do is to figure out what you’re interested in majoring in, and comparison shop. Find the best universities for that major. Then compare things like cost, comfort, culture, whether you like the campus vibe.
Some universities will have unique advantages.
For instance…if you want to go into research…John Hopkins has the most massive research budget of any university in the country. (almost twice the budget of University of Michigan…which is number two for research spending according to the NSF)
Figure out what you want to do…and go where you’re most likely to build a good network, meet the best minds, and have the best opportunities that your educational stats will allow.
Do go for the reach schools. Never hurts. Also…more selective schools give better financial aid if money is an issue for your family.
If you have a lot of financial need, and are not a CA resident, then going to an Ivy (assuming you can get in) would probably be much cheaper. If you are a CA resident and don’t have financial need, then you’ll spend about $150K more to attend an Ivy. That’s a lot, even if your parents can afford it. The education you get depends on what you put into it–you will get a good education at any of these schools, and much of the time you will be teaching yourself. The biggest differences you will notice are 1) regional culture, and 2) the student body. The undergrad student body at an Ivy will be more global. A good chunk of the undergrads at many ivy league schools will be alumni kids, or kids of important people, or athletes. Many others will be freaks of nature (academic, musical, etc). The undergrads at UCLA and Cal are much more likely to be from California, and more likely to be “normal” (but smart, driven, high-achieving) people. Bear in mind that half the people on campus at Harvard, Berkeley, and UCLA are grad students or postdocs. Those populations will be largely equivalent at these three schools, drawn from around the world, and from colleges all over the US.
I could say a lot more, but to answer your actual question, I would say no, Ivy league schools are not better. College is what you make of it. You want to go to a school that’s a good fit, and that has the resources and critical mass in your major field for you to succeed. But there are dozens, if not hundreds, of colleges in the US that meet the “resources” requirement in your planned fields.
Depending on what you want to do, and what your extracurricular interests are, there will be lots of schools better than any of them you’ve mentioned. Look past the prestige bubble and vet your choices based on what’s important to you.
If you want to be an engineer for example, the best Ivy school, Cornell, is no better than a reasonably strong state school. UCB and UCLA are both solid, but have massive classes and administrative bloat. My son had high stats. He visited a few Ivies and UCB and ended up not applying to any of them feeling there were many better options elsewhere.
As others have said, it depends on you major, your stats and your financial situation.
I more or less agree with #9 so far as engineering itself is concerned.
However lots of people who begin their training and/or careers as engineers wind up doing something else. Either immediately or eventually.
For certain unusually highly-remunerated fields- such as investment banking and consulting- there has been a hiring preference for snobbish-sounding schools. Perhaps because the firms are constantly submitting “pitch-books” with staff resumes, in order for the firm to get hired. For that purpose, all things being equal, they would rather show a pedigree from [insert snobby school] than not. Because there might be a common (and not always justified) presumption, among people who do not already know you, that you might be smart. While other alma maters do not necessarily come with that presumption. Outside of engineering.
I myself was the beneficiary of this practice. After all my engineering projects were canceled due to high interest rates, I got interested in finance, and went to MBA school. The “word” was the investment banks only hired students from that school who had Ivy (or presumably equivalent) undergraduate degrees… I got interviews at investment banks, and went to one. Some classmates who were smarter than I am did not get interviews.
I’m by no means justifying this, but that’s how it in fact went down.
In fairness to myself, I may have had more apparently going for me than those other people. But I don’t know what.
Of course that was a long time ago. YMMV and all that. But when you are still in high school and just applying to colleges you have no idea how the course of your work career may evolve. I certainly didn’t.
Similar hiring practices might be going on, to some extent, with some of the most “prestige” tech firms. Though it is undoubtedly expanded to cover the techie places like Carnegie Mellon. But I hear all the time about people from Columbia, Brown, etc going to, e.g., Google. In addition to the “better” engineering schools, and the the most local schools. These places don’t go to every campus to hire.
So I’ve read.
UCLA and UCB are world class universities with a cache of Nobel Prize Winners in their fields. Remember “ivy league” started with an athletic league. It doesn’t automatically confer academic excellence and prestige. On the flip side, There are a ton of top notch elite colleges and universities which are not ivy league because they weren’t around at the time the league formed, but just as presigious, such as Stanford, Cal, Pomona, Williams and the like.
Note that in my above post I was referencing the “lots of schools” and “a reasonably strong state school”. in post #9.
NOT Berkeley and UCLA specifically. These are two of the very highest reputed state schools, not just “reasonably strong” ones. We had someone from Berkeley in my department at the I-bank. Though only for the West Coast office…
And by all reports these particular schools do not suffer in prestige tech firm recruiting. Quite the opposite.
“I understand that the ivies would be considered more prestigious to most, but are ivies truly better than top tier public schools?”
The quick answers are either “no”, or “it depends”.
If you want academically strong public schools, Berkeley and UCLA and Michigan and McGill and Toronto and Georgia Tech and several others are excellent, and for many specific majors will be stronger than some or even all of the Ivy League schools.
But in terms of finding a good fit for you or your kids, you or your kids need to think about a lot of factors.
@monydad, i agree, there’s no doubt that for a few jobs, pedigree outweighs the reality of the schools actual performance. In addition to IB, I would think if one wanted to be an east coast lawyer in a powerful firm, or the President, prestige matters, and would be confined to a narrow group of institutions.
Google recruits widely, and presumably hires strong applicants from a wide range of colleges (though more selective colleges may have a higher density of strong applicants). Recently met an employee of such from a religious school ranked in the 50-150 range overall and in CS.
Obviously, this may be different from other employers, or other industries like investment banking.
As someone who goes to UCLA, it isn’t necessarily better to go to an Ivy League. Of course they’re seen as more prestigious, but if you’re thinking of psychology, the program at UCLA is one of the top programs in the nation. I’ve made connections with very well known psychologists in the field just because of the vast opportunities available at UCLA (psychology-wise). UCLA doesn’t have a business major, however.
as somebody from california, the only ivy’s i know of are harvard, yale and princeton. (is carnegie mellon an ivy? if so i really like that one for it’s musical theater program). all the others dont mean a thing to me. i might hear their names, but i dont have any place where i rank them in my mind and would probably think ucla or uc berkeley are better.
though when it comes to politics, i might think the ivy’s (that ive heard of) might be better because of the DC, NY, Boston area. this comes from personal experience, but anyone who ive met who is really knowledgeable about civics and politics tend to be from that area. i dont really think californians are that into politics… even the younger generation that is very liberal dont really seem to /know/ or care much about polls or other districts/states (aka the east coast has more political nerds than california, mainly because we tend to be blue by default so it’s not as interesting to involve yourself in all of the nitty gritty stuff).
berkeley tends to be very high in rankings for a very wide variety of subjects so i would probably think it’s better than ivy’s (except for harvard, but probably comparable to yale and princeton, imo)
these are just my own personal thoughts on this, so i guess if you want to know how prestigious one or the other might sound, here is an opinion from a californian !
We need to get away from the idea that somehow ivy or prestigious college automatically means success. Not so. Lots of successful people went to their state university, like Rex Tillerson. On the other hand, there are plenty of ivy grads who don’t have the interpersonal skills and other attributes to rise to leadership positions within their own company.
One thing that I don’t believe has been mentioned is the size of UCB and UCLA. While both of these schools are wonderful they are huge and if you are looking for seminars etc you’d be hard pressed to have access to them on a regular basis for most of your undergraduate career. Going to a university that is 30k students is very different than one at 8k. If you can spend some time on these campuses and ask current students the pros/cons