I’ll give my testimony. I never set foot on the Chicago campus (and barely ever set foot in the city of Chicago) until my child enrolled there, but from the time I started paying attention, everything told me the University of Chicago was one of the great universities of the world, a name that had all sorts of prestige associated with it.
I graduated from high school in 1974 in the near Midwest. I came from a family where higher education was highly valued, and prestige mattered. In my mother’s family, which was my key clan, essentially everyone smart at some point went to Harvard, including my grandmother (Radcliffe '19), all of her brothers and one brother-in-law, and both of my parents. The first time I visited Harvard, I had lunch with four cousins who were undergraduates there (and who generally despised one another); three different cousins were in college there during my college years, and I had an uncle on the Medical School faculty.
Anyway, I was a really good student, the top boy at a regionally respected private school, which at that time essentially entitled me to go to college wherever I wanted. My appropriate education was a topic of conversation in my extended family. My parents consulted with my most academic cousin (Harvard AB, Princeton PhD, then an Assistant Professor at Princeton), whose interests were close to mine. They drew up a list of colleges they deemed adequate for my talents. It was Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Chicago. (Berkeley and Stanford would have been on the list, too, on academic merit, except that, as my father put it, “There’s nothing in California that you can’t get at Harvard or Yale. That I’m willing to pay for.”)
So, yeah. Forty-five years ago, my hyper-prestige-conscious family, who really wanted me to go to Harvard, told me that Chicago was one of four (or six) acceptable alternatives. Chicago was Milton Friedman, and it was also Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom. I didn’t seriously consider going there, because (a) Yale was effectively the center of the world in the subjects that interested me most, (b) my best friend also wanted to go to Yale, and © when students talked about it, they all sounded like masochists, which wasn’t attractive. But the message I got was that Chicago was in the limited club of world-class universities.
When I got to college at Yale, that view was reinforced on a regular basis. There were any number of young faculty who had gotten their PhDs at Chicago – Tom Pangle is one whom I still remember as really exciting – and graduate students who had been undergraduates there. Chicago professors who came through to give talks were stars. People talked about the University of Chicago all the time – including when Gen. Pinochet turned to a group of Chicago-educated economists to turn Chile’s economy around, and they largely succeeded. There was no question that, from the vantage point of Yale, Chicago was a peer institution.
That view was solidly reinforced at Stanford, where I went to law school. It was clear that Chicago’s law school and its economics department were one of the most important intellectual nodes in the country. I had brilliant classmates who had been Chicago undergraduates, and other friends who went on to teach there. I had a prestigious clerkship after law school, and one of my co-clerks came from Chicago’s law school. Engineers at Stanford may not have known much about Chicago, but for anyone in the professions, humanities, social sciences, Chicago was one of the very few places that mattered.
Where I live, 700+ miles from Chicago, I have 4-5 friends in my generation who got their bachelors degrees from Chicago, and another friend’s best friend from high school is a well-known professor there. At the well-known, highly academic private school my kids attended for 11 years, when they were in high school, the University of Chicago was the #3 destination for graduates of that school, behind only Penn (which is local) and Harvard. Including my daughter, six kids with whom she had been classmates in middle school were undergraduates at Chicago. When my daughter was deciding where to go to college in 2005, the prestige of Chicago figured significantly in her decision, although less so than its intellectualism. She got that not just from her parents, her school, her friends, but also from our neighbor, a biophysicist, who told her, “When you apply to graduate school, the University of Chicago name really matters.”
In my wife’s field, probably the most important research in the last 50 years was done at the University of Chicago. My daughter spent four+ years working at one of the snootiest, brand-name foundations in New York, a place with multiple ex-Ivy League university presidents on the board, where every staff member had a “prestige” alma mater. So did she. It was clear to her, not that she got her job there because of her Chicago AB, but that she would never have been interviewed if that hadn’t marked her as part of the club.