I can add more information about my specific situation in a later post, but generally speaking - how should one determine whether or not a school with a higher reputation is worth a higher cost when comparing two universities?
The quick answer is: It depends, but in a great many cases price is more important.
If you want to work in investment banking then prestige matters. If you are going to law school then the prestige of the law school matter, but where you go for undergrad matters a lot less. If you want to become a management consultant for an expensive management consulting company, then prestige matters, but again the prestige of your MBA will matter more than the prestige of your BSc or BA.
For most other purposes prestige really doesn’t matter much. I am most familiar with software engineering (approximately the industry I have been in for a few decades, with the understanding that “software engineering” has many sub-specialities). In software engineering what you can do matters, prestige doesn’t. The best software engineers that I have worked with went to public state universities, and they have been very successful. We (or the company that I am semi-retired from) hire a lot of graduates from public state universities. Once you are on the job, people care what you can do. Pretty much no one cases where you went to school.
How much the price matters also depends. If your parent’s second home is worth into 8 figures or either parent has a salary into 7 figures then price might not matter. On the other hand, if you are going to take on any debt for undergrad then price matters a lot. Many students get burdened with a large amount of debt, and this can be a major problem going forward. If you are in a field where you will need to go to graduate school (or medical school or veterinary school or law school or …), then you are going to have a big problem if you find yourself not being able to afford graduate school (or…).
Finding a good fit in a university matters a lot. Unfortunately this is a lot more complex than just “take the school with the highest ranking”, and can actually require quite a few visits and quite a bit of thought. It usually also requires taking the price into account.
If you give us more details, then you will probably get a more focused and less rambling answer.
@Ryanium2 Depends on the schools in question and your intended career. If you want to break into top finance consulting and government jobs right after college then prestige matters a lot. If you wanna do an MBA later on undergrad prestige also matters. If you want to attend other grad school programs then it matters less, but the top colleges that have top grad schools usually provide an advantage to their undergraduates for admission into their grad schools. For example there is a slight advantage to being a Yale undergrad if you want to end up at Yale Law or to being a Penn undergrad of you want to end up at Penn Med. That said most times for grad school price of undergrad is more important than prestige. Grad school is expensive and you can get into a top grad school from any college, so it might be wise to save up your money.
It is probably worth mentioning that when I was in grad school at a well known very selective school, there were students there in the same graduate program that had done their undergrad at a very wide range of universities. Many had gone to their in-state public flagship university for undergrad.
Depends on three factors:
- The difference in price
- The difference in perceived excellence between the two universities
- The intended major/career path
Undergraduate education can be measured in two (at least) major ways:
- Actual quality of education (were you properly prepared for a career in X
- Outcomes - which company did you get to start that career with
There are some industries that will only actively recruit (think on campus recruiting, building relationships with students over their 4 yrs, etc) from a small list of “Prestigious” schools. May seem unfair but it’s reality. Investment Banking, big league Consulting, etc. They feel the schools have already weeded out the kids simply through admissions and they they only take the best of those kids. Makes sense. DO they miss a few diamonds in the rough? Sure but who cares because they get a never ending stream of high caliber talent from HYPS and the like.
That said, they don’t necessarily provide a better education than other top schools (say top 50 or 100). in fact, some would argue that you get a better education at the next tier if all classes are taught be profs instead of TAs, the focus is on undergraduate teaching, not research, etc.
Unless you are set on the exclusive industries / jobs, it could make a lot of sense to get a great education at a significant savings. Some of it depends on location. Where do you want to work / live after college. The elite schools will give you opportunity everywhere. The next tier tend to be more regionally focused. So…if you want to live / work in the southeast in a non ruthlessly competitive industry (from a recruiting standpoint), you’ll do just fine attending a good southern school. If you want to work at Goldman Sachs, you have an advantage of at least getting the interview if you attend a top 20 school. For those guys, the cost is irrelevant as they make 6 figures first yr out of undergraduate. So it really depends on what you want to do in life.
@Ryanium2 You had previously posted that you were interested in perhaps going to grad school for PolSci with history/philosophy as an intended undergrad major. Assuming that is still the case, looking at Faculty rankings for one of your undergrad interests - philosophy; the top 5 schools are NYU, Princeton, Rutgers, UMich and Yale.
In-State Rutgers tuition is <$14k, out of state $30k, NYU, Princeton and Yale are all >$45k, U Mich has in-state comparable to Rutgers and out-of-state comparable to the three privates. Attending any of the schools, achieving excellent grades, developing a relationship and earning strong recommendations from your professors and producing powerful writing samples would position you very well to land a PhD slot at a top ranked PolSci grad program.
Let me give you a real world example. We live in FL. My son was accepted at UF (state flagship, good business school) and Wake Forest (far more prestigious and GREAT business school). Although he had an outstanding resume, he was not offered merit aid at Wake but was admitted into the Honors program with a scholarship at UF. We don’t qualify for aid so the real numbers are 70k vs 10k. Is Wake worth the difference…it depends. If you go strictly by education and, say, an accounting degree, hard to argue “yes”. Both are respected and place well with Big 4. The specific difference in that would be location. UF recruits to FL offices whereas Wake will recruit to Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, RIchmond, DC, etc. That actually could be worth a lot as those practices might have higher profile clients, more opportunity,e tc. But let’s just agree that for pure accounting, not much of a difference.
We chose to consider other things like, quality of professors, size of classes, campus community, personal attention, and overall experience to determine it was worth the difference. We know our son would have done well at UF (and I’m sure learned to like it), but he is thriving at Wake Forest and he LOVES it.
Now, fortunately for him, we are in a position to take care of the cost. We are making him take out a small loan and work to put some skin in the game but he will graduate with modest debt (30k) that should easily be paid off in a few yrs based upon the exceptional jobs and placement that come out of Wake. If we didn’t have the resources, he would be attending UF. Very hard to justify 100k+ debt unless you are virtually assured a significant outcome that would otherwise be unobtainable.
And except for elite investment banking and management consulting, that is rarely if ever the case. You can get where you want to be from many undergrad programs.
rickle, Wake is not that much more prestigious than UF (if at all), let alone "far more prestigious. They are very different from each other, to be certain, but there is no real gap in prestige, at least not where academia and industry are concerned.
As for Business schools, again, I am not sure why you think that Wake is “great” while Florida is merely “good”. According to the US News business school ranking, Florida is actually ranked slightly better than Wake. Even Bloomberg’s flawed rankings, which rank Wake’s business school higher than Florida’s, clearly show that employers consider Florida and Wake peers. The main difference is student evaluations, where Wake does much better than Florida. Which brings us to the next point.
Wake will definitely have more resources on an individual basis, and classes will be smaller. Is that worth $200k? I guess it depends on how much of an independent learner your son actually is, and how much money you have to spend on his education. Personally, I do not think so. Had the difference in cost of attendance been significantly smaller (say $15-$20k/year instead of $50k+/year), or the difference in the quality of the institutions been more extreme (say Wharton or Sloan vs Florida), the cost difference may be justified, but between Wake and Florida, I do not think it is.
Price has to be weighted versus your financial situation.
Prestige has to be weighted versus how certain you are not to change majors or career plans and whether that prestige is attached to the school as a whole or to your department in particular. There are a lot of schools with an average overall ranking but a gem of a department hiding among the offerings. There can also be an only average department within in a more prestigious school.
Prestige also won’t make you high-achieving by association. Just because famous so-and-so went there doesn’t mean you can have a career like theirs just by attending the same school. Your own ambition and effort and past and future opportunities play into it.
not sure how familiar you are with UF. Very crowded is putting it mildly. The reality is that many classes, including weed out classes like intro to accounting are only offered online. There is virtually no professor / student interaction until you get well in to your majors. Know many families with kids attending and this is a real sore spot. UF markets it as take the class whenever you want, fit in to your schedule, can always go to office hours, etc. The reality is they offer it this way because they have way too many kids enrolled for their facilities. Even in the business school, many classes are taught via the ELP (electronic learning platform) which in essence is a video recording of the class (different than online class). They say you can always take the class live but there is limited seating. Live is virtually always an 8 am class. Makes me wonder why some even move to Gainesville (other than partying) if they have to take so many classes online.
They actually have a track that is entirely online (required) for the first year. It’s for students that could succeed at UF but didn’t get full admission. They allow them to take their whole freshmen yr online (literally not allowed to take courses on campus). How about just denying admission? They would rather accept all these extra folks without having resources for them. Very sad.
You can’t compare that type of education with small classes actually taught by leading professors in their field. There’s a reason Wake has been ranked number 1 in teaching for many years. There’s also a reason why Wake has had the #1 CPA pass rate for first time takers some ridiculous number like 13 out of the last 17 years.
For top grad schools and employers on a national basis, Wake has a tremendous reputation. On campus recruiting from the major consulting firms (Bain, McKinsey) and BB investment banking companies.Their head of career services is a former Bain guy who came to Wake from Stanford where he was in charge of career placement for Stanford’s MBA program. UF is very popular with employers in FL.
I don’t put a lot of wait into the ranking rags. That said, there’s a reason Wake has been listed by USNWR as a top 30 school for 22 straight years. There’s a reason why virtually every meaningful list has Wake Forest listed as a top school and / or top undergrad business school. UF gets some recognition for sure, but nowhere near the recognition of Wake Forest.
Your title says “prestige” but the body of your post uses the word “reputation”. It’s important to separate the two. Prestige is what impresses other people. Reputation is how a school is regarded in general and in specifics. It’s perfectly reasonable to look for a school based on its academic reputation, or job placement reputation, or even party reputation (back it up with research). Choosing anything for its prestige value is ultimately unsatisfying since you’re always dependent on other people’s opinions to validate your choice.
@Ryanium, You may find some of the information in the article of interest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/choosing-a-college-major.html?emc=eta1
rickle, you were asking about prestige. Wake Forest is not that prestigious. It is a very good university, but it is not prestigious. Not any more prestigious than Florida.
I think your evaluation of Wake Forest’s business school is a little off. To my knowledge, BBM do not recruit Wake students, and this is supported by Wake’s own placement report. According to last year’s placement report, not a single Wake BBA graduate was placed into any of the three. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley do not really recruit at Wake either. However, Bank of America does recruit quite a bit, and JP Morgan and Citibank also recruit quite a bit. However, considering the number of Finance majors, the competition for those jobs will be steep.
Like I said in my initial post, and as you also confirmed, resources at Wake will clearly be more readily available to undergraduate students. Classes will be smaller. If those matter to you, and it is perfectly natural if they do, then Wake may well be worth the extra cost, assuming you can afford it without too much hardship (I wouldn’t sell the farm). But from a point of view of prestige, Wake simply does not have an edge over Florida…certainly not to the tune of $200k.
You’re kidding, right? Wake is much, much more prestigious, as well as a much better learning environment. I have nothing against U of F (or I didn’t, until I read the description in this thread), but it’s no UVa or UNC.
You make a good point regarding reputation vs. prestige. That is probably a better term as prestige is so subjective and has a fluid definition. Although reputation is also subjective, it can be backed up by data points. X number of kids at BB front office spots, X number of Big 4 Partners, stats of admitted students, etc.
If you have to go in debt more than the federal limits for the student, then prestige isn’t worth it.
Straight from Wake’s First Destination Report: From the class of 2016 Finance Majors, there were 38 investment banking analysts out of a class of 115. That’s pretty strong. Others went to corporate banking , F500 finance, consulting etc. Those banking jobs were pretty evenly split between NYC and Charlotte (heavily recruited at Wake). Firms included Goldman, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, CITI, Barclays, BofA, Wells, UBS, Jeffries, Steifel.
This was just the finance majors. Other majors like math, stats, econ, etc also recruited in to investment banking. Most of the above mentioned firms are on campus fall and spring.
This Forbes article addresses your question, but you would need to consider its methodology as well as its application to your circumstances: