<p>Let me take a guess...in California and in the Northeast nobody has ever heard of the service academies...they've never heard them when they were mentioned in nearly every movie and documentary made about the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean Conflict, and the Vietnam war. They don't know that virtually every famous general and admiral in those wars went to a service academy...Custer, Patton, MacArthur, Nimitz. They don't know Jimmy Carter, Ross Perot, John McCain, Oliver North, James Webb, and even Montel Williams went to service academies. Nobody they know was ever in the military just like nobody they know ever watched a college football game.</p>
<p>ye ive been telling people im going to chicago, and i get the feeling they have no idea what it is really. for prestige only, i'd rate chicago pretty low. That is, if you define prestige as the general public's opinion. If you're talking the opinion of more intellectual circles, then i'm sure chicago would be higher</p>
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Adding fuel to the fire but some of the overrated schools like WUSTL/Emory/Vandy/NotreDame should actually be replaced by CMU/Berkeley/Georgetown.
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<p>They're all excellent schools. What do you mean by "replaced?" Demolished and razed to the ground? =)</p>
<p>Or just a switcheroo :)</p>
<p>I wonder how many graduates from the 'top 15' become teachers?</p>
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Quote:
And very few laymen know of MIT, unless you're finding your laymen in Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and Amherst. </p>
<p>I went to a big public high school close to Chicago, with over 600 kids each grade. Every single kid from my hs knew what MIT was, even if we are lucky to send even 1 or 2 grad to MIT each year.
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<p>Patlees, I would suggest that the college awareness among students at an upper middle class suburban high school where most are headed for college is far different from the college awareness among the average layman man on the street, including blue collar workers.</p>
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If I didn't get into Stanford, I would've turned down Yale for Cal. Cost wasn't an issue (full scholarships). I simply like Cal more.
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<p>KyleDavid, did you end up accepting Stanford's offer because you find it a better school or because Stanford made it more viable financially than its rival from across the water**?</p>
<p>How can cost not be a factor? </p>
<p>While Yale might offer very generous need-based financial aid, it does not offer merit-based scholarships, let alone full scholarships. On the other hand, the current and future financial aid limitations at Berkeley will place substantial burden on current and future students. For many students, especially the ones who could get full financial aid at schools that meet 100% of need or introduced new financial policies (a la Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, et al) public schools such as Berkeley ARE more expensive on a four-year basis, and much more expensive when factoring the cost of post four year attendance (needed to graduate.) </p>
<p>The issue of prestige should not have anything to do with financial aid ... and very little with the more important best fit for undergraduate students. On the other hand, financial feasibility and best fit are intimately intertwined when having to make a final decision. This said, the assumption that students tend to attend the "best" school at which they were accepted is a very valid one. There are no reasons to believe that it is different for Berkeley and that for the overwhelming majority of students Berkeley was the the highest ranked schools that offered an admission.</p>
<p>** Fwiw, you were absolutely correct when stating that Berkeley and Stanford are enjoying one of the best rivalries among universities. Of course, all rivalries are not between equals. :)</p>
<p>I agree with Pizzagirl (again)...it's quite possible Patlees' school's guidance counselors were pushing awareness of top-tier schools. But in the Midwest that's not typical or guidance counselors, and like P.G. said, it certainly doesn't reflect "laymen."</p>
<p>SIDEBAR:
Pizzagirl also asked a relevant question earlier about how would laymen even be aware of MIT on a widespread basis. And that might lead to a broader question about how people find out about colleges in general. Sports on TV is obviously a big one; seeing a college name on T-shirts and sweatshirts is another; the college mentioned in movies and TV shows is also there. Other than that...guidance counselors promoting certain schools, college rankings, relatives and friends who went there. MIT's been a couple recent movies, and always shows up on college rankings, but other than that, how would laymen be that aware of it?</p>
<p>Also: In this entire thread it's clear that a lot of people aren't aware that there are a lot of people for whom prestige isn't the #1 criterion in picking a college.</p>
<p>Of Course, the pinnacle of prestige can also be associated with some of America's most competitive and difficult to get into service academies.</p>
<p>Just to list some:</p>
<p>United States Military Academy (USMA, aka "West Point" or "Army")
United States Naval Academy (USNA, "Annapolis" or "Navy")
United States Air Force Academy ("USAFA" or "Airforce" or "The Hill")</p>
<p>Army beat Navy!!</p>
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I agree with Pizzagirl (again)...it's quite possible Patlees' school's guidance counselors were pushing awareness of top-tier schools. But in the Midwest that's not typical or guidance counselors, and like P.G. said, it certainly doesn't reflect "laymen."
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<p>At my hs, guidance counselors only met with the students who were seniors through appointments. Also, my high school wasn't an elite school, but it was merely a public school in suburban Chicago. Most counselors promoted schools like Umich, U of I, Purdue, Illinois State, Michigan State, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, etc, not schools like MIT, HYPS, Caltech, Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Duke, UChicago, or even Northwestern (which was less than 20 min away from my school). In fact, from our school, only top 5% of the class made it to top 20 schools. I would say that the student body at my school weren't really elitist, but would reflect 'normal' upper-middle class Americans at one of the biggest cities in the U.S. For the record, most people at my school didn't even know about UChicago, Georgetown, Dartmouth, Brown, Vanderbilt, etc. Yet, they all seemed to know HYPSM. Also, the notion that most layman aren't familiar with MIT's name is somewhat news to me. I guess those 'blue-collar' workers who don't know MIT wouldn't really know any other top schools anyway. I get the impression that those who are even remotely cultured would know about MIT and HYPS.</p>
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Of Course, the pinnacle of prestige can also be associated with some of America's most competitive and difficult to get into service academies.
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<p>I agree. Getting into West Point, Annapolis, et al is incredibly prestigious and impressive.</p>
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Pizzagirl also asked a relevant question earlier about how would laymen even be aware of MIT on a widespread basis. And that might lead to a broader question about how people find out about colleges in general. Sports on TV is obviously a big one; seeing a college name on T-shirts and sweatshirts is another; the college mentioned in movies and TV shows is also there. Other than that...guidance counselors promoting certain schools, college rankings, relatives and friends who went there. MIT's been a couple recent movies, and always shows up on college rankings, but other than that, how would laymen be that aware of it?
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<p>In Chicago, among laymen, NU's more known than UChicago, for several reasons: 1) Big Ten sports / rivalry with U of Illinois; 2) Visibility of the campus / buildings in places (Evanston, prime real estate downtown) that more people would frequent versus Hyde Park, where most Chicagoans don't go except for a specific reason. Does that make NU more prestigious than UChicago? I don't think so. UChicago is enjoying more awareness nowadays because of Obama -- does that make it more prestigious all of a sudden?</p>
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Also, my high school wasn't an elite school, but it was merely a public school in suburban Chicago. Most counselors promoted schools like Umich, U of I, Purdue, Illinois State, Michigan State, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, etc, not schools like MIT, HYPS, Caltech, Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Duke, UChicago, or even Northwestern (which was less than 20 min away from my school).
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<p>That's the same thing with my two teenagers' suburban Chicago public high school.</p>
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I get the impression that those who are even remotely cultured would know about MIT and HYPS.
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<p>EXACTLY. these "laypeople" pizzagirl and tourguide are mentioning are those who are not even remotely cultured. but i guess they had money enough to buy tvs for themselves and watch college football all day. and somehow, they learned enough about wartime heroes to know which heroes have attended which service academies, and yet, still have no idea *** MIT is.</p>
<p>what kind of ppl are you hanging out with anyway? like WWII veterans or something?</p>
<p>you guys must have felt really good when you watched Good Will Hunting and you turned out to be the only one among your friends who knew what MIT was. up until today, i had no idea MIT was something that one has to be cultured to know.</p>
<p>harvard, princeton, yale, brown, duke, stanford, oxford, cambridge, cornell, columbia, MIT, upenn, naval academy, cornell...georgetown/berkeley/chapel hill.</p>
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these "laypeople" pizzagirl and tourguide are mentioning are those who are not even remotely cultured. but i guess they had money enough to buy tvs for themselves and watch college football all day. and somehow, they learned enough about wartime heroes to know which heroes have attended which service academies, and yet, still have no idea *** MIT is.
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<p>Whoa, what's with the hate? Plenty of salt-of-the-earth people do the jobs that keep the economy moving (factory workers, restaurant workers, construction workers, etc.) and don't have time to be "cultured." They're still valuable people even if they don't know what MIT is but have heard of Notre Dame or UCLA football.</p>
<p>my respect for Montel Williams just went through the roof -- first African American to enroll into the Naval Academy Prep School.</p>
<p>The_prestige, where have you been these last 3 months?</p>
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KyleDavid, did you end up accepting Stanford's offer because you find it a better school or because Stanford made it more viable financially than its rival from across the water**?
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<p>Neither. Many things went into my decision—not all within my own power, either. In fact, some of the things that went into my decision were very specific to me (for example, the focus of Stanford’s linguistics department on computational linguistics).</p>
<p>Neither was more “financially viable”—no loans, no work-study, no family contribution.</p>
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How can cost not be a factor? </p>
<p>While Yale might offer very generous need-based financial aid, it does not offer merit-based scholarships, let alone full scholarships.
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<p>You assume that it was merit-based. (I never said it was.) For low-income students like me, HYPS and Berkeley are more than willing to pay the way. ;)</p>
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On the other hand, the current and future financial aid limitations at Berkeley will place substantial burden on current and future students.
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<p>No—not in my case, at least.</p>
<p>Alex, where you counting the days my friend? :)</p>
<p>The markets have been wreaking havoc on some of the funds I've been managing and I needed to unplug from the net and focus. I'm back on track now so I'm easing back into life now.</p>
<p>btw, what's your view on oil prices? you think we're headed higher or do you think the speculators are going to take money and run? its really the $64,000 question on Wall St.</p>