<p>This is perhaps in the wrong forum, but having seen and participated in a lot of discussion about prestige lately, I thought it would be interesting to have a meta-debate about what prestige is and which colleges have it. According to Webster's prestige is "standing or estimation in the eyes of people: weight or credit in the general opinion". To put this in a college context, prestige is how favorably people view a particular college and its graduates. At some level, prestige is intuitively obvious; we all know that Harvard is prestigious and your local community college is not, but when you actually start getting into the nitty gritty, it's much harder to say which colleges are more prestigious.</p>
<p>One of the big challenges with prestige is determining whose opinion matter. Various rankings measure different sorts of prestige. The peer assessment in the US News Rankings, for example, is based on a survey of university presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions. It measures prestige in the eyes of university administrators. It is unclear, though, why the prestige attached by university presidents to various universities would matter to students.</p>
<p>The kinds of prestige that matter, I think, depend on the student. If you're applying to graduate school, what matters most is prestige in the eyes of graduate school admissions committees. A very rough proxy for this might be graduate department rankings for the discipline in question, but I think that does a poor job. In my own field, international relations, for example there is an excellent survey of all international relations faculty at all US colleges and universities; in other words an almost perfect gauge of prestige among the people who decide graduate admissions in the field. There's a connection between undergraduate and graduate rankings, but it's not straightforward. Harvard is at the top for both graduate and undergraduate programs, but other schools do differently. Georgetown, for example, is ranked #4 for undergraduates but #13 for graduates. Dartmouth (#9), Swarthmore (#14), Williams (#18), William and Mary (#22) and Middlebury (#24) don't even have PhD programs. GWU is ranked #10 for undergraduates but not at all for graduates. American is ranked #11 for undergrads but not at all for graduates. Other schools rank very well for PhDs but poorly for undergrads. In general, public universities are ranked better for their graduate programs than their undergraduate programs, but others schools shift as well: Cornell is ranked #10 for graduates, but #16 for undergrads. Although I am working from a small sample here, I would suggest that the same general trend carries over to PhD-granting disciplines in other fields. There should be a general correlation between graduate ranking and undergraduate prestige, but not a strict one. Large publics, because of their large undergrad class sizes and so forth, will also tend to be much less prestigious for undergraduates than for graduate students.</p>
<p>A second prestige that might matter is prestige in the eyes of professional school (e.g., law and business) admissions committees. This is, very roughly, what the Wall Street Journal college rankings got at, but the task is complicated by other factors. I'm not aware of any survey asking professional school faculty or admissions committees to rank undergrad institutions.</p>
<p>Then there's prestige among other students. This correlates closely with selectivity - as that is a measure of how many people want to go to a particular school. The best rankings, though, are the revealed preference college rankings. They measure what schools students actually chose after being admitted to several, which is an excellent method. The complicating factor, though, is that a student might choose a school not because it is "better", but rather because it is more affordable or closer to home.</p>
<p>Then there's prestige among employers - who do they think are the best schools? The problem, though, is that "employers" are a very broad and heterogenous group. It's hard to ask them all. Some components of the Business Week rankings of undergraduate business programs try to get at this, but they are limited to business students.</p>
<p>Finally, there's prestige with the general public. Which schools does the man on the street think are best. It's unclear why this should matter, but it's obviously important to some students. The closest measure I can think of would be media mentions, but that's a poor metric.</p>
<p>I'm interested in creating some sort of a meta ranking based on the sorts of rankings discussed above and any others people might name. Any thoughts?</p>