<p>Here’s probably the top twenty or so colleges, in terms of prestige, from the perspective of a North Carolinian:</p>
<p>Tier 1: HYP, MIT, Stanford
Tier 2: Dartmouth, Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Brown, Caltech
Tier 3: Northwestern, Chicago, Duke, UNC, Wake Forest
Tier 4: Emory, Notre Dame, UVA, Georgetown</p>
<p>^^^^Sorry you can’t include UVA!</p>
<p>HYPS
MIT
Cornell, Columbia, Brown
Dartmouth, Penn, Amherst
Caltech
Duke/Northwestern
Berkeley
Emory
WUSTL
Michigan</p>
<p>Yeah, I was pretty much a layman in terms of colleges until junior year, so I’m going off the impression I had at that time.</p>
<p>^^Sorry you can’t include any publics in this thread. They’re not top 20!</p>
<p>idk up here in Canada, only the top Ivies get respect but I’ll just say how US schools are perceived at my school…</p>
<p>Harvard
Oxford
Yale/Cambridge
MIT
Princeton
Brown
Columbia
Johns Hopkins
Penn
Emory
Dartmouth
Duke
Notre Dame
Vanderbilt</p>
<p>Lol you can’t put emory that high…you’re going there!</p>
<p>lol slipper… I understand that in whole of Canada, its not like that… so I was just referring to our school and Emory gets a lot of love from our school because one of our teachers talks about it a lot… or maybe Im just trying to justify my bias… idk! </p>
<p>Realized I forgot UC Berkeley… that’s pretty high on the list as well!</p>
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<p>I have to agree with RML on this one, at least with respect to the original question of the thread. The fact is, Berkeley is a more powerful brand than is Emory, or most other schools. Emory may arguably be a better educational experience for the typical undergrad - although I’m not entirely convinced of that - but Berkeley has a more prestigious brand, a notion that I think even most Emory students would concede.</p>
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<p>Well, no, to that I can’t agree; not exactly. Prestige seems to be a strong function of graduate education, or, specifically, strong research, yet that has little direct relevance to the typical undergraduate. That is why practically nobody has ever heard of any of the LAC’s. </p>
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<p>They would market themselves in the same manner as the top LAC’s do now, despite practically nobody ever having heard of them. The top LAC’s seem to enjoy not only excellent rates of admission of students to the top graduate programs, but also garner surprisingly high starting salaries despite graduating relatively few professional degree (read: engineering) students. Swarthmore students actually earn higher starting salaries than do their counterparts at Berkeley despite being located in Philadelphia which is clearly a cheaper location than is the Bay Area, and Harvey Mudd graduates actually earn higher starting salaries than do Caltech graduates, if Payscale figures are to be believed</p>
<p>Would someone be kind enough to define “lay” so that we can have standards to follow in offering “rankings?”</p>
<p>What is “lay?” Your Joe the Plumber, or your average Bourgeois Bohemian?</p>
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<p>Sakky, the top LACs, say the USNews’ top 10 LACs, are also prestigious. Maybe not as popular as Berkeley is overall, but they are prestigious schools. When I say prestigious, I mean respectable schools, not just in America but outside of America as well. Those schools receive applicants from many states and countries too. For example, I’ve heard of Amherst, Williams, Shwarthmore, Bowdoin and the Claremont Colleges when I was in high school. Most high school counselors must have heard of them as well, and would recommend them to the students. I even applied to Mudd and Bowdoin. The top employers must have heard of the top LACs as well. But overall, I wouldn’t really say that they’re more prestigious than Berkeley. </p>
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<p>Research is also part of excellent education as research is a scope within the realms of academia. </p>
<p>I also really think that in order for any school to gain prestige, the school must have an excellent combination of both high excellent teaching and research standard. Having a great professional school would certainly add to the overall prestige level of the school name. HYPSM and Oxbridge are perfect examples. Caltech and Berkeley are heading towards that direction. These 9 schools are believed to be the top 9 universities in the world. Chicago, Columbia, UPenn, Michigan and UCLA are in the next group. </p>
<p>A research powerhouse alone would have a hard time gaining prestige or respect. UIUC, Texas-Austin, Wisconsin, Penn State, Purdue, UF and a few others are all research powerhouses, but I don’t think either one of them is considered a very prestigious school. Somehow, the academic standard of these schools is imbalanced. Whilst they are all excellent for postgrad education, they only have average to good undergrad education.</p>
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<p>I think you also forgot Stanford. I think Stanford is highly respected in Canada, especially in Toronto, where you’re from.</p>
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<p>Your standard paradoxically excludes arguably most - perhaps all - of those schools, for the simple fact of the matter is that none of those schools is particularly noted for teaching. </p>
<p>Caltech is the archetypal example, having been consistently and notoriously identified for subpar teaching by Princeton Review and other studies for a number of years, a notion that my brother and other Caltech graduates would freely attest. One poster here (rocketDA, I believe) has recommended never taking a Caltech course on a subject you enjoy, lest the course squelch your love for that topic. Even a noted Caltech fanatic such as Ben Golub has conceded that a number of professors are conspicuously poor teachers. </p>
<p>But the same could be said for those other research universities. The fact of the matter is, you don’t really need to be a competent teacher to be promoted to tenure, and indeed the tenure process specifically delineates a ‘publish or perish’ mentality to the neglect of teaching. </p>
<p>*Scholarly output rises; undergraduates are disengaged. “This is the real calamity of the research mandate – 10,000 harried professors forced to labor on disregarded print, and 100,000 unwitting students missing out on rigorous face-to-face learning,…</p>
<p>…“I think these two trends – to do more and more research and less academic engagement on the freshman level – are not unrelated,”</p>
<p>…“The incentives are obvious. If you’re a professor whose future depends on the amount of pages you produce, then all those hours you spend talking to freshmen about their majors, about their ideas, about their summer reading … really paying attention to these wayward 18-year-olds who are fresh out of high school, you’re hurting yourself,"</p>
<p>… in a research-oriented world, the undergraduate classroom is a throwaway in all too many places."*</p>
<p>[News:</a> Unread Monographs, Uninspired Undergrads - Inside Higher Ed Mobile](<a href=“http://m.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/18/production]News:”>http://m.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/18/production)</p>
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<p>It seems that what you mean to say is that those schools lack undergraduate admissions selectivity. But that has nothing to do with the teaching quality. </p>
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<p>Well, I’ll put it to you this way. Until the college application rounds of my senior year of high school (which was in the United States), I had never heard of the LAC’s, nor had practically anybody else in my high school. And my high school was one of the better high schools in the country. In fact, one of the great benefits of the USNews ranking is it popularized the LAC’s in a manner that had never happened before. </p>
<p>Moreover, I suspect that many (perhaps most) Berkeley students have never heard of most of the top LAC’s either. Let’s face it: many Berkeley students were successful California high school students but are not particularly concerned with the minutia of the college rankings. They know that Berkeley is the flagship school of the UC system and they have some awareness of the Ivy League and MIT, and they are well aware of Stanford, but have little awareness of any other top schools.</p>
<p>Allow me to lay down a specific challenge. Find somebody who is in the bottom 50% of the class at Berkeley - to which half of the students must belong by definition - and ask them to name 5 prestigious LAC’s. Most likely, they can’t do it.</p>
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<p>This thread is regarding lay prestige, and I think there is little dispute that the LAC’s lack lay prestige.</p>
<p>What is lay prestige… but my options in order:</p>
<p>MIT
UT
Berkeley
Caltech
Imperial
Stanford
Glasgow
Cambridge
Harvard
Simon Fraser
Yale
and the rest is pretty much the same</p>
<p>Region: Mid-Atlantic</p>
<p>Harvard
MIT
Stanford
Notre Dame/Duke
Johns Hopkins
Cornell
Princeton/Yale
Northwestern
Penn/Columbia
Dartmouth/Brown
Vanderbilt
CalTech/Chicago
Emory
WashU
Rice</p>
<p>By “lay” prestige I’m assuming a middle-class graduate of a state university. (S)he is an adult who has been to college (therefore has neighbors, relatives, and friends who attend, have attended or expect to attend college, therefore has some interest in this issue). However, (s)he has no professional expertise either in college admissions or in an academic field. (S)he did not attend (or expect to attend) a tippy-top school, but may want this for his or her child.</p>
<p>Such a person has heard of the Ivy League but probably can’t name all 8 members. (S)he knows that Johns Hopkins has a world-famous hospital system and may assume that this correlates with undergraduate academic quality, but probably could not make a principled distinction between the academics at Hopkins and the academics at its lacrosse rivals. Size and sports success play a big role in the perception of prestige in this demographic. If a school is smaller and is not (like Notre Dame or Duke) a sports powerhouse, or has not (like Harvard and MIT) entered popular lore as a metaphor for exclusivity and brilliance, then all sorts of factors may come randomly into play to grab attention (such as the alma mater of the incumbent POTUS). If he or she runs a business, (s)he’d just as soon hire an affable kid with good grades from Penn State as pay a premium for the same grades from Princeton (or put up with any hint that the applicant has a sense of entitlement based on where he’s been or who she knows).</p>
<p>I think the days are gone when the tastes (or hiring practices) of upper class families in New York City and New England dominated the rest of the country in defining prestige in colleges or anything else. Compared to 50 years ago, many more people from all over the country attend college. Financial and cultural influences are more dispersed. So the Ivy brand image may continue to have a lock on the imaginations of recent Asian immigrants, but not so much when it comes to the average smart kid from Minnesota, Texas, or Nevada.</p>
<p>That’s how I think of “lay” prestige and size it up for my region. For niche career sectors (academia, IT, finance) or graduate admissions, the picture changes a bit. If we want to weigh and rank by purported quality metrics (average class size, selectivity, faculty distinction, endowment, graduate outcomes) the picture changes a bit.</p>
<p>I can name the Ivy League, and the New Ivies as well!</p>
<p>Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia</p>
<p>Edit: Brown came first because I watched Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince yesterday. :)</p>
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<p>I would actually argue the opposite: it is precisely because of the mass popularization of the college degree combined with the status of the degree as a signal-laden positional ‘branded’ good - the worth of which is defined by those who can’t have it - that has made the high prestige schools not only more salient, but becoming even more so over time. Let’s face it. 50 years ago, to be graduating from any college, no matter how unremarkable, would have branded you as an exceptionally learned potential employee, relative to the bulk of the population, and practically guaranteed that you would have your pick of a strong career. Nowadays, practically anybody who wants a college degree can get one from some school, and as a result, numerous job specs that never required college degrees began doing so. I used to work for a company where even the secretaries all had college degrees - many with master’s - yet you don’t really need a college degree to perform secretarial work. </p>
<p>The focus of competition and signaling has therefore shifted from simply having a college degree at all to where you obtained your degree. True, only a small percentage of industries truly care about where you obtained your degree, but those are precisely the types of industries that the best college students seem to want to join. For example, in recent years, nearly half of all Harvard and MIT undergrads who entered the workforce took jobs in management consulting or finance, with many others taking jobs in highly exclusive tech firms such as Facebook, Google, or startups. Phillipon & Reshef have a working paper that documents the increasing salient of education in the finance industry; as recently as the 1970’s, a college degree didn’t particularly matter in the finance industry, and indeed, some Wall Street bankers had never even graduated from high school. Nowadays, not only do you need a college degree - but strongly preferably a high prestige degree - to even secure the interview. </p>
<p>What we therefore have is an escalating arms race: the more popular the college degree becomes, the more salient the high-prestige degree. The fact is, whether we like it or not, as long as the college degree has proliferated so, you are going to be judged on where you obtained your degree rather than simply having a degree at all. I unfortunately see no easy way to slow this train.</p>
<p>I live in Michigan,
Harvard
Yale
Columbia
Northwestern/Notre Dame
Brown
Chicago
MIT
Duke
Princeton
Dartmouth
Cornell
CalTech
Stanford/Penn
Rice/Vanderbilt
Hopkins
Emory/Wash U</p>
<p>I think almost everybody has heard of Stanford, but they tend to associate it with football. I don’t think stanford’s academic reputation is nearly as widely respected as everybody here seems to think it is. I think it’s hard for a lot of people all across the country to give a lot of repect to any college in California. I lived in California for several years, and I couldn’t believe how superficial the people in general were there. And that influences how I see the colleges there…it’s the last place I’d think of to go to get educated.</p>