<p>Phead, you bring up a great point about what everyone in your high school thinks about prestige.</p>
<p>I think there are a few things that drive prestige:</p>
<p>1) Selectivity, naturally.</p>
<p>2) School history, alumni, reputation</p>
<p>3) How much money did they give you (ie did you get a scholarship?) In this case, the kid getting a full ride to Ohio State is "more prestigious" than the kid going to Case Western Reserve for a boatload.</p>
<p>Wow, someone brought up a point about 20% becoming a gigantic number for admissions rate; I'm starting to think that my school is slacking :).</p>
3) How much money did they give you (ie did you get a scholarship?) In this case, the kid getting a full ride to Ohio State is "more prestigious" than the kid going to Case Western Reserve for a boatload.
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</p>
<p>That is certainly not true. The Ivies don't give merit money at all, but they do cover need based aid. Just because you get a full ride from a local state school trying to attract you does not mean it's more prestigious than a top 10 only covering need.</p>
<p>Beefs, that's obviously true, but when you're talking about a State University versus one of those schools that is only known to be a good school on a place like CC, there is a difference. Ohio State versus Case Western was only an extreme example. I hadn't heard of most of the hidden gem schools until I joined CC.</p>
<p>And this is how we know we can discount anything the people at Hippo's school think.</p>
<p>This isn't what people in my school think (my classmates are very college savvy) but rather what many people in NY and other areas in the Northeast think (ie-adults)</p>
<p>Stanford is a foreign entity to many people in the Northeast and even those who have heard of it often don't realize that it's a rival school for HYP. </p>
<p>Granted, there are still quite a lot people up here who do recognize Stanford as the wonderful school that it is, but Stanford isn't a school that I would expect everyone to know and appreciate (unlike Harvard, Yale, etc)</p>
<p>^^ I live in Pennsylvania, which is obviously not far from NY, and I would say that Stanford, along with Harvard and Yale, is one of the top three most recognized colleges (among laypeople).</p>
<p>We even see this in pop culture - Stanford and Harvard appear so much in movies, TV shows, etc. that they are so familiar to practically everyone in America.</p>
<p>Agreed with coolman123. I was just in the area, and Stanford did "wow" the locals. (At one point, when I was checking in at the airport, the person who checks for IDs saw that I was wearing a Stanford sweatshirt, asked me whether I'm going there, seemed very impressed, and said, "Good job, your life's set for you." So apparently Stanford does hold prestige even out on the East Coast / Northeast.)</p>
<p>Nah, Stanford is the Stanford of the West coast and Harvard is the Harvard of the East Coast. Two pretty different schools, both very awesome in their own ways.</p>
<p>
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Stanford is the Stanford of the West coast and Harvard is the Harvard of the East Coast.
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Thats right on.</p>
<p>I don't like to see schools refer to themselves as the "Harvard of the (insert region here)" as if Harvard was some sort of magical gold standard that all other schools try to live up to, instead of trying to be unique and special in their own ways.</p>
<p>Read the TIMES QS University rankings.
- harvard, princeton, yale, oxford, cambridge, mcgill, columbia...read the listing, its the most accurate. i only remember those being in the top 15.
and correction, harvard of the north was officially handed to Mcgill university! Officially.</p>
<p>lol @ the last comment. Officially? It's a stupid term to begin with, McGill is McGill, Harvard is Harvard. You only have 4 posts, but I can assure you if you keep the fanboyism up, McGill will have the same rep that Duke does on these boards. But this is a college forum mind you, not a university one in which case you'd be dead wrong.</p>
<p>Definitely in terms of international prestige the THES looks right but I believe that top American univ.s and Oxbridge are in a league of their own, followed by McGill, ANU... yeah why not? But prestige isn't everything and McGill is facing major competition in terms of research output in fields outside the life/health sciences. The problem is exactly students like you, they don't demand enough from the universities crummy admin, they love it when they look @ peer assessments and rankings of their faculty and selectivity, but ignore the fact that research output and funding isn't really as good as it used to be (which isn't everything either, though it was McGill's claim to fame).</p>
<p>Regarding the whole "Harvard of ____ is stupid" whine: it's just a layperson's reference...like calling Linus Pauling the MJ of chemistry. It's not an insult to either party involved.</p>