<p>I saw the Rich and Powerful Attending "ELite" Schools article, but what do you guys even consider to be an elite school?</p>
<p>I define it as an "elite school" if one's major is top 10 in the country</p>
<p>(I will post this in HS Life to see what they say)</p>
<p>I do not understand. Where did you find rankings of schools based on major strengths? Graduate school rankings are not the same as undergraduate program rankings.</p>
<p>I have always used the term “elite” to refer to schools with very low admission rates, a high number of applications, and an applicant pool with outstanding high school records and very high SAT/ACT scores. Or to put that more simply, schools where it’s ridiculously hard for even the best of the best to get admitted.</p>
<p>If all of the above only applies to a program at some school (for example, an honors or engineering college at a state university) then it’s reasonable to describe the program as elite even if the school as a whole is not.</p>
<p>Eliteness is likely to correspond roughly with USNews rankings and/or quality of instruction, but by no means will it map to rankings or quality on a 1-to-1 basis.</p>
<p>I look at results, not input. How well does it produce leaders in business, government, and the arts? How well does it produce PhD? How well does it place grads in prestigious med, law, and business schools? How good are its grads at winning prestigious nationally competitive awards like the Rhodes and Fulbright? How well does the school place on Wall Street? How many startup founders does it produce? The results mostly track the inputs like selectivity/scores (HYPSM+Caltech are at the top), but there are differences due to schools gaming. For instance, Vanderbilt isn’t in the top 50 in any of the first 4 ranked categories, despite having inputs similar to the Ivies/Ivy-equivalents. In fact, by outputs, URochester outranks Vandy. Meanwhile, UChicago is in the middle of the Ivies despite having a high acceptance rate for a long time. The LACs also outperform their inputs. Swarthmore, Williams, and Amherst perform like Ivies (and many other LACs also perform very well) despite having higher acceptance rates than the Ivies. For instance, Macalester (which usually is not included among the top tier of LACs) performs better than Vandy in all 4 ranked categories.</p>
<p>Also, Illinois CS only trails Stanford/MIT/Harvard in producing startup founders, and has many/most Ivies beat on a per capita basis in that category.</p>
<p>If an “elite Club” is super-selective/hard to get into/it’s the club that gets to choose its members, I suppose schools would be something of the same. It speaks of a closed or barely open institution, and has great snob appeal.
It says nothing about the genuine intellectual and creative quality, or the vibrant and healthy social environment. But at times all can have a fortunate confluence. The notion of ELITE, by itself, doesn’t speak to it.</p>
<p>I pondered how much the fact (it is sort of documented) that the people who run countries were more likely to come out of such clubs/schools has to do with the connections they made there or the fact that they came from well connected families to begin with, or was it the education/instruction/training of the schools themselves. I’d like to see this studied more. Articles noting the connection between the social elite and the elite schools are just stating a circular self-evident fact.</p>
<p>The ivies plus the other top 25 universities, plus the top 10 LACs</p>
<p>Elite is defined as:</p>
<p>“a select part of a group that is superior to the rest in terms of ability or qualities.”</p>
<p>This may reign true for many universities. You have to remember that there are thousands of universities in the US. Most of them are never even said on this website. If a school is ranked at all on Usnews, that’s a telltale sign it’s a member of the “cream of the crop” of US colleges and universities.</p>
<p>“Elite” can have varying divisions based on levels of selectivity. If you only think the most selective 1% of US universities are elite, so be it, if 10%, 15% etc.</p>
<p>Compared to most of the universities in US, your state flagship is something I’d likely consider an “elite school”.</p>
<p>I think most of you have way too narrow a definition of elite - either it describes something you want to get into and can’t or it’s something you got into and want to hold over everyone else. Step back and look at it from another perspective - that of the average American. </p>
<p>For them, there are a whole host of schools way beyond their dreams of ever attending - we’re not talking about affording it, we’re talking about surviving a semester at the place even if they could go for free. That’s a pretty wide group of schools, or maybe a narrow one, depending on how you look at it. Narrow in the sense that the number of schools you need a 28 ACT (90th percentile) to do well are relatively small compared to all the colleges out there, but wide if your definition of elite is restricted to HYPSM (what I would call the elite of the elite). A 28 ACT has the intelligence to get a Ph.D. or professional degree in most fields and they would also survive most of the hyper-elites if they only had the space. If your school is mostly populated by that group of people, you can probably make some claim to “elite” status at least according to normal people. I would guess that is around 100 universities and LACs, plus or minus 25.</p>
<p>I was listening to D’s friends describe signing up for college courses over the weekend - an eye opening experience. These are above average kids going to state flagships or directional states - in no sense elite, but good. Their course lists sound like junior year of HS compared to D - that’s not being snobby, that’s just some perspective They will all do well, becoming productive members of society and members of the middle to upper middle class. Some will even do better. But what’s being asked of them is nowhere near what’s being asked of D her first semester - and she is going to one of those 100 schools. It’s easy to see the difference. Whether it makes a difference in the end is up to the individual student.</p>
<p>Depends on the subject.</p>
<p>ABET engineering should cover the same material, and the top public CS programs will cover the CS material as fast and as deeply as any CS program out there.</p>
<p>I suppose there can be a distinction drawn between “publicly elite” and “CC elite.” Publicly elite schools would be any school with an average ACT above a 28 or an average SAT above a 2000. CC elites are the Ivies + Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Chicago, and Duke as well as WASPCH and the other top LACs.</p>
<p>what are the c and h in waspch???</p>
<p>Claremont McKenna and Harvey Mudd. Including them with WASP might be a slight mistake, but they can hold their own in the social sciences (CMC) or engineering (HMC). I consider them of roughly equivalent quality and prestige as WASP.</p>
<p>
President Johnson went to Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College, Nixon went to Whittier College, Reagan went to Eureka College. Chelsea Clinton’s success in business or politics will have nothing to do with having gone to Stanford rather than UC Santa Barbara. Colleges do not “produce” leaders or mold people into positions of power and greatness; that may be correlated with, but not caused by one’s alma mater. Many CEOs have gone to un-elite colleges. This list is a few years old, but gives evidence:
<a href=“Where the Fortune 50 CEOs Went to College - TIME”>http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1227055,00.html</a>
If you are talking about undergrad schools who produce the most future Ph.D.s, you’re going to be looking at a fistful of LACs such as Reed, Grinnell, Carleton, St. John’s College, Oberlin.
Your criteria are faulty.</p>
<p>Per capita. Anecdotal evidence means nothing.</p>
<p>And it’s not more faulty than looking at acceptance rates and test scores, which tells you nothing about how much a school improves the people it takes in (outputs at least are due to both inputs and improvement by the school).</p>
<p>And indeed, LACs like Reed and Carleton <em>are</em> great at producing PhDs. I’m not sure why that makes the criteria faulty, though. A lot of the LACs also place well in to elite professional schools and produce prestigious award winners and leaders in several fields at a high rate as well. That doesn’t make the criteria faulty. That means LACs do a good job of improving their students. If Macalester takes in worse inputs than Vandy but produces high quality outputs at a higher rate (in virtually all aspects) than Vandy, to me, that means that Macalester is a better school than Vandy. Only those caught up in the mentality of the high school popularity contest would think otherwise.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Poor argument IMO. Since the focus here is on the school itself, what do you say about the liberal arts major attending Harvard with a 3.0 GPA, and the physics major attending University of Arizona with a 3.8 GPA?</p>
<p>Which student deserves more respect in this case? Which student has more rigor to deal with? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The elite colleges do not create leaders, they attract and gather them.</p>
<p>As an experiment you could move this Fall’s 1600 Harvard Freshmen to Western Michigan University and I don’t think that they would go any less far in life because of the change of school. </p>
<p>Well, they’d lose Harvard’s alumni network, the reputation of having gone to what is considered the best school in the country (by a significant portion of the population), and the on-campus opportunities of Harvard…</p>
<p>@snarlatron:</p>
<p>A school can have talented grads 2 ways:
<p>Usually, it’s a combination of both, and if you are a kid looking at where to go to college, both are good. Obviously, becoming better is good. Being part of a network of talented people who will go places is also good, however. I still don’t see how my criteria is worse than other ways of ranking (such as just looking at test scores or admission rates).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The focus is on the school and which are the elite schools, not the individual majors or the individual students. Note my last sentence:
</p>
<p>Does Arizona contain elite students? Of course! Is Arizona a good school? Yes. Is Arizona an elite school? No, and no school that has a mid-50 of 21-27 ACT is going to be considered “elite” on the whole, though it undoubtedly contains elite components.</p>
<p>I think you also dismiss the liberal arts major at Harvard a little too easily, and I speak as a STEM grad. You’re comparing apples and oranges and trying to argue that the orange is the superior fruit by virtue of the fact that apples on the whole are a lot easier to grow, but that tells us nothing about their relative value in the marketplace. Nor how they compare within the apple and orange markets. You can grow a really fine wine that is better than an average 1st Growth Bordeaux, but the public will still pay for the pedigreed wine, while you get to enjoy your really great wine in anonymity and the knowledge that your’s is really better. So too with college degrees. That is the tyranny of the marketplace.</p>