I talked to my friend who visited Rice University the other day and noticed that the local school from our area (UC Berkeley) was seen as highly regarded in comparison to Rice, and many even said it was better. This was said by Rice students and locals from the area when my friend told them he was from the Bay Area. I thought this was odd, as the common trope is that there is a lot of pride in the local university/ies and so one from the area would say it/they are better. Now, Rice is seen as STEM heavy in some senses as is UCB, and so maybe it was a direct comparison there, but I was wondering if this occurs normally at any scale? Obviously if the school is HYPSM then I would imagine high pride, but would Nashville locals say Vanderbilt is not as good as Emory? Or Notre Dame folks saying WUSTL is better? I would not expect close rivals to say this (UCB and Stanford, UChicago and NW, Harvard and Yale, etc), but does this occur normally?
I have talked to Massachusetts parents whose kids thought that the University of Vermont was better, and I have talked to Vermont parents whose kids thought that the University of Massachusetts Amherst was better. In both cases there was an issue of “I know too many kids who are going to the local school and want to do something else”.
I am not sure if this is more widespread. I have NOT noticed Massachusetts students saying “Stanford is better than Harvard” nor California students saying “Harvard is better than Stanford”.
What I want to know is…who cares? As long as the person who is interested in the schools they are vetting knows what they can materially deliver, what does a few peoples random comments on prestige matter. You seem inordinately preoccupied with other’s perceptions. In reality Rice and UCB aren’t really in the same orbits, so comparing one as better than the other in aggregate seems sort of silly. They are very different.
The Rice students’ response about UCB might have been precipitated by a number of factors.
At some level, it might have reflected the native generosity and good manners of Texas students, who were playing the good host by saying nice things about a competing school located in the same region from which the visitor hailed. On the other hand, there are a lot of NorCal kids at Rice, so some of the Berkeley boosting might have come from California transplants who wanted to give props to their “local” UC back home.
Most likely, however, your friend was simply witnessing a fairly realistic assessment of the relative strengths of two schools, which–despite their current STEM focus and their similar rankings in the USNews top-25–are really very different kinds of institutions. UCB is a vast enterprise, one focused on providing research-oriented graduate education in a broad range of disciplines; it is one of the best schools in the world at accomplishing this mission. Rice, by contrast, combines the intimacy of a large liberal arts school (until recently, it undergrad enrollment was only around 2900, which was not a whole lot bigger than Middlebury’s) with the research opportunities normally associated with much larger, more graduate-focused universities.
UCB and Rice have different missions, different visions of how best to conduct undergraduate education. Being committed to the one mission or vision need not dictate that one cannot appreciate and acknowledge the various benefits and advantages inhering in the other mission or vision. It was probably such an appreciation and acknowledgment that your friend was witnessing.
In my daughter’s experience at Rice, she has found her fellow Owls to be pretty pleased with and focused on life at Rice. They don’t seem to sit around moaning about how they didn’t get into their first choice or how they wish they had opted for an Ivy over Rice. In short, while Rice students do seem to understand that their small research university–with its residential colleges and beautiful, oak-draped quads–is a singular place, this singularity does not cause them to suffer from an inferiority complex or a case of buyer’s remorse vis-a-vis peer schools. On the contrary, it makes them all the happier to be Owls!
For public universities with competitive sports teams, yes, but “elite” private universities may be a little different. Many of these schools are not powerhouses in marquee sports (football, basketball.) They tend to be relatively small, yet enroll students from all over the country. They are out-of-reach (for both admission and cost) even for many good, middle class students who could get into (and afford) a respected, larger, in-state public university. They generally are exempt from taxes that other private property owners would pay if they occupied the same space. For all these reasons, many local people may not be emotionally invested in them and may even resent them.
@eyemgh It was just an interesting observation. It was just weird to me that the first thing my friend heard at Rice was a plug for UCB. And not even a small one, some even said that he should go to Cal instead. All I was wondering if this type of thing occurs at other universities.
I think a bit of “the grass is greener” phenomenon is present in college life/college admissions. Everywhere has blemishes, flaws, and annoyances. No place is perfect. Students experience these on a daily basis. (I can never get any of the classes I want!) Meanwhile, there are lots of schools out there with sterling reputations. So it’s easier to see them as “better.”
Similarly, the schools in our community can seem less exotic. We see them every day. For someone in South Bend Notre Dame students and school gear might be something they see every day. They might very well have pride in the school and want to go there. Or, they might think, wow it would be pretty cool to go to Vanderbilt, weather’s nice, and campus looks so different from what I see every day. In Nashville, they might be tired of seeing “Commodores” and the Vanderbilt “V.” Notre Dame might look exotic.
On top of that, some students want to go to school with lots of friends and familiar faces from their high school. Others want to jump into a new world.
Sometimes you do not realize how good your local uni is until you hear it from other people, or visit other campuses. We toured about 30 universities with Michigan (our local uni) as the standard of comparison. Most were not as good, some were of similar quality but different, and it was hard to find more than a handful that we considered superior. We didn’t like the attitudes at some of them either. But among the top 30 or so, there are just different flavors of the same great ice cream (but with different prices)