<p>It’s painfully obvious (even to the proverbial “5th-grader”) that I was referring to your unsubstantiated claim that: “Now [NU’s] sharing more cross-admit with HYPMS and lose out more.” Since you didn’t provide a source for this, I’ll presume you don’t have one.</p>
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<p>I noted earlier that Caltech’s yield/admit ratio may underdetermine its prestige due to its self-selecting applicant pool. I’d include Chicago as well. That said, I never claimed that the ratio serves as a perfect proxy for “prestige”; it is only an estimation. (I really don’t know how many times I have to repeat this for you.) Given how close Chicago’s yield/admit ratio is to that of the other schools, one cannot definitively conclude that Chicago’s prestige is less than that of these schools. I also wouldn’t say that Chicago is significantly more prestigious than NU just because it has a slightly higher ratio. But it does seem as if both are not as prestigious as, say, Brown or Dartmouth.</p>
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<p>It’s a crying shame that my MIT education didn’t teach me anything about fancy numbers and such.</p>
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<p>Fair enough. But let me ask yet another time: “Do you have a more objective (less biased) measure of “prestige” other than your own personal opinion and/or affiliation?”</p>
<p>Both inputs have little to do with prestige. </p>
<p>Yield may be influenced by financial aid policies, which have nothing to do with prestige.</p>
<p>Admit rate is influenced by the size of the applicant pie, which has little to do with prestige. (For example, the former Seven Sisters that are still all-female have significant prestige; however, they have relatively high admit rates, just because the pool of applicants who want to consider an all-women’s school is self-selecting and relatively small.)</p>
<p>^^the “unsubstantiated claim” was based on what i read (vaguely recalled) in one of NU articles (perhaps from daily). also the sharp drop in yield coincides with the sudden bump on SAT scores. so even if i recall incorrectly, it’s still not a completely baseless speculation.</p>
<p>just because i can’t come up with any objective measure doesn’t mean i should embrace anything out there blindly or yours is credible. but i did explain what some of the factors that go into college admissions are. so did pizzagirl. there are a lot of factors and you’d need much more complex analysis and somehow come up a way to isolate the prestige factor. maybe that can be your MIT honors thesis!</p>
<p>refrigerator, the reason that some of us say (with apologies to Schmaltz for stealing his line "no one cares how famous a college is in Bumf<strong><em>istan) isn’t because Bumf</em></strong>istan is unimportant.
It’s because the good people of Bumf<strong><em>istan aren’t basing anything on any facts or research, just on general impressions, which typically translate to “I’ve heard of College A so it must be good; I haven’t heard of College B, so therefore it can’t be any good.” That’s a dumb way to formulate opinions, so that’s why we don’t care about them. Maybe if they formulated opinions based on actual investigation of what’s good and what’s not, we’d care about their opinions. But when they’re just formed on awareness and there’s an unwillingness to even consider that some places that may not be household names in Bum</em></strong>istan may indeed be good and that household-name-itude-in-Bumf***stan is not a precondition for quality … well, then, forgive me for ignoring their opinions as worthless.</p>
<p>It’s like surveying third-graders and asking them what the coolest car is, and then concluding that an Aston Martin can’t be a cool car because the third-graders never heard of it. It’s based on nothing even remotedly resembling data and investigation.</p>
<p>YK, dimsum, that the people who are painfully trying to put down other top schools don’t come across as “prestigious” or elite in the least. You may be unaware of how truly prestigious people come across. They’re self confident and they don’t need to put down other top schools, because there is room at the top for a lot.</p>
<p>Personally I always put Northwestern alongside Chicago, Cornell, and (maybe just slightly below) Duke.<br>
Higher than Rice, JHU, and WashU.<br>
Lower than Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, and Penn. </p>
<p>These are my two cents as an East Coaster. I probably would have said the same in high school, now as a college student I pretty much think its the same based on the impressions I’ve gotten at my school.</p>
<p>How convenient that you only “vaguely recall” this article! Still, you shouldn’t have much trouble locating this source. Try listening to yourself:</p>
<p>Let me get this straight. Objectively saying that Northwestern is less prestigious than the Ivies, Stanford, Caltech and MIT but not more prestigious than Chicago, Duke, etc. is “painfully trying to put [it] down”? If I really wanted to put NU down, trust me, I could be doing a much better job. </p>
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<p>We clearly have different standards for what constitutes “the top.”</p>
Did you not see what I said even if my recollection were off? Searching for that is definitely harder than seraching for simple things like admission stats. So nice try copying me. </p>
<p>Looks like numerical trend doesn’t come natural to you. You don’t seem to have the quantitative skills that I’d expect from a MIT grad. The stupid ratio you came up with just seems too juvenile; I would expect something much more rigorous, let alone a stupid one you gave us. Also, I’ve never seen anyone from MIT would dance around different schools boards just to “objectively say” those schools aren’t as prestigious as Ivies. You can claim whatever you want but I think people on this board don’t really believe in you.</p>
<p>This tiff is quite petty I must say for both sides. Northwestern is a great school and it’s one of the best in the country. PERIOD. No need to bicker over a couple of spots in the top 20. Not everyone can be #1, nor can everyone go to the #1 school in the country. It’s so Northwestern to care about what other people think about our school in every aspect, I think it has to do with the undertone of people rejected from Ivies (I myself suffered from that at one point in my naivety), but I think we all know that “Ivy” is an outdated title, and it’s pretty clear that nowadays we’ve shown ourselves as a worthy equal. Cut the BS and have some confidence for our school. Go U!</p>
<p>You don’t seem to have the writing skills that I’d expect from an NU grad. Your understanding of basic grammar & syntax just seems too juvenile.</p>
<p>Or more to the point: NU engineering grads from non-English speaking countries aren’t necessarily people one expects to have writing skills from, whereas almost all MIT students are in math or science fields.</p>
<p>It seems frivolous to be arguing about something based almost entirely on personal opinion and not concrete data. There is no chart that quantifies the “prestige” of one school compared to another. Furthermore, do you people realize how many other individuals would dream of even being wait listed at a school like NU, MIT, etc? One’s time as an undergraduate is simply in shadows of the end of result which is one’s potential career, so bickering about it seems like an immature contest of pride. This quarrel has really gotten out of hand.</p>
<p>I made a mistake of feeding the ■■■■■. I encourage all of you to stop responding to dimsum123. I just discovered that he joined CC less than a month ago but has already posted numerous inflammatory messages on Colubmia, Rice, and Penn boards like no tomorrow. Please do not feed the ■■■■■.</p>
<p>Perfect timing. I just posted the below on another thread.</p>
<p>I live in Chicago and was recently talking to a friend of my mother’s. She said that two of her children went to Northwestern and one went to Northern Illinois. The most successful of the three? The one who went to Northern Illinois. She’s a CFO of a major corporation in Chicago. My mom’s friend said it burned her up for years paying back the loans for Northwestern when “they didn’t make any more money than anyone else.” Of course, other people’s experiences may be different, but I’ve worked in Chicago for 15 years, and Northwestern=DePaul=UIUC=Northern Illinois=out of state school. Add Loyola and Marquette to the equation.</p>
<p>Getting an Executive MBA from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern is a definite distinction. Prestige will allow you to keep your self esteem up throughout college until you enter the real world and have to find another way to feel good about yourself.</p>
<p>Susan, I’m sorry, but one exception to the general way of thinking does not validate the equilibration of the schools of Chicago. I was saying it’s petty to try and rank the top 20 schools of America, not of Chicago. It is definitely not fair to say all are equal.</p>
<p>I think susanr64 did bring up some valid points. Success at work is much more than just being booksmart. Adaptability, work ethics, ability to relate to others, personality…etc all play important roles in future success. People with superiority complex and entitlement issue would probably do poorly relating to others and you may find them coming out of top schools. Also, it’s pretty accurate to say companies don’t pay more just because you graduate from NU/UChicago instead of say, UIC. Employers do recognize the name of NU/UChicago which translates to higher number of interviews and offers but not higher pay for a given offer. Within the same firm, the offer for, say, its entry-level position is going to be the same. That’s why I encourage people to consider finance heavily when they look at schools. If one is from a wealthy family though, then going to more prestigious schools may worth it because there’s added value in studying in a better academic environment with more driven/intellectual peers; there’s also probably better chance to get admitted to top grad schools or land offers from top firms. One can’t assign dollar-value to those advantages.</p>