Prestige and rankings have different meanings and effects in different ways. Some are reflected in published rankings, some are more nuanced.
1 – High prestige often begets high prestige and money – It encourages alumni donations. It helps to obtain grants.
2 – The prestige of some schools are true door openers – At the most extreme, purely having a Harvard degree is a door opener in just about every field. Acme College may have a particularly good program in XYZ, but the degree may not carry much weight appearing on your resume.
3 – Particularly program specific, some schools may give a better education in a field than another school. Literally, a student at one school may have a better learning experience in one school over another. The methodological rankings really don’t do a great job capturing this as the quality of learning/teaching/education is more than just student-faculty ratios, etc. So a school may have a particularly great program in XYZ. It may better prepare the student for the workforce than another school. But the literal degree piece of paper may not have as much $$$ value as a more prestigious school.
Now, all that said… In terms of having a degree where the piece of paper by itself is a real door opener, probably only applies generally to T10 schools and a few other select schools/programs. Even a great T20 school like Georgetown or Duke, the degree itself isn’t going to instantly grab a recruiter reading a resume the same way as a Harvard/Yale degree. And the recruiters initially culling resumes often aren’t aware of the more specific programs that might be particularly strong at different universities. Syracuse University has an excellent Communications Department. But if Amazon or General Electric is hiring an entry-level position in the Corporate Communications Office, and that low level recruiter is charged with culling the best 20 resumes out of 500… they are more likely to grab the applicant with the Harvard degree than the Syracuse Degree.
Personally, I’m not a fan of any rankings, not just because they tend to be too simplistic and generic, but because they do much more harm than good, IMO. What make similar programs different can’t possibly be captured by a single number (i.e. the position in the rankings). What’s best for one student may not be the best for another. What makes one program better for a particular student than another is primarily the people in that program: the student her-/himself, her/his fellow students in that program, and the faculty in that school, that department, and that particular field s/he is studying, at least for the courses s/he would be taking and the researches s/he might be involved in.
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Prestige and test scores do not always = success. You have to look at the degree and the program to decide if that is true. Students that want to be veterinarians do not have to go to a top 20 and top 100 school to do well. They want to go to a school that has the coursework vet schools need that is excellent, have opportunities for research or hands on work, etc. My son had a 29 ACT 6 years ago. That was not high but met what he needed to get into a great early admit program to vet school. This is a student with high grades, severe dyslexia that had no accommodations (thanks to our state), that had issues in standardized test taking. Fast forward to the GRE and did far better. BUT he is the top of his class entering his 3rd year of veterinary school. He didn’t need a 36ACT and 22APs, or an IVY.
So submitting scores or not is up to you and what you feel will give you the outcome you want for your goals. Oh and by the way most vet schools are dropping the GRE requirement because they don’t feel standardized tests show how well a student will do in veterinary school.
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Can I nudge the thread back to the original question? Because everytime someone shifts the conversation off topic to subjects like prestige, rankings, and ABET, my eyes just glaze over.
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Practically speaking, where is the best place on the forums to post specific questions about “should I submit this test score to XYZ college?”
The way that scores are used in admissions seems to be really school dependent, not as straightforward as “compare your test score to the median.”
- For example, UW Seattle admissions said that they only look at the test score if they are about to reject someone and they think the number might turn a rejection into an acceptance.
- As another example, we were just at CU Boulder last weekend; they told us not to be afraid to submit scores, because they primarily use them to make a case to admit students, rather than to weed out students.
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