I’m reading many posts today that mention “elite” schools. Not sure why all of a sudden its jumping out at me but…anyways, what is your definition? Is it Ivy only? Top 10% unis and LACs? Acceptance rate based? Where is the line between top tier and middle tier?
If a college can charge $250,000 to educate someone over the space of four years and somehow manage to persuade 50% or more of its customers to pay it - it’s an elite college.
A school I couldn’t get into?
Keep in mind elite means superior to in terms of ability or qualities.
I wouldn’t label a particular university as elite necessarily overall but certain programs yes. As an example Stanford, UCB, CMU and MIT are elite in CS. Wharton is elite…Jerome Fischer is elite…Juilliard is elite for music and so on.
I use it generally to mean very well regarded LACs and Us that are very selective in admissions.
If I meant “Ivy” I’d say “Ivy”. Elite includes a lot more schools than those.
YMMV.
I am the very definition of elite.
When I use the word elite, I am using it to indicate a relative measure that’s tied more with sentiment as it is with actual quality. I make a distinction between “elite” and “top” when I’m using the language here at CC (and I personally prefer “top”), mostly because of the culture here.
@circuitrider’s definition is actually kind of close to how I use it: there are some schools that are top quality schools that offer excellent educations…but they are also not the kind of schools that entice parents to pay $250K of cold hard cash; lure students to pay outrageous OOS tuition when they could just stay within their own state and get a similar experience; cause students to try to shape their own interests and behavior to chase admission at these places; and induce all sorts of anxiety on the poor 17 and 18-year-olds and their parents doing this dance every year.
By that definition, the Ivies are elite; Stanford is elite; Duke and Vanderbilt and Emory are elite; Amherst, Swarthmore, Williams, Holy Cross, Smith, Pomona, and Wellesley are elite. University of Wisconsin, despite being an excellent university, is not elite - but University of Virginia is.
There are some places I throw into a sort of “borderline elite” bucket because the sentiment/fever dream qualities are there, just not in the same magnitude. Places like NYU (which is a really special case, mostly because it’s location in New York makes it more attractive than I think it otherwise would be), Brandeis, Tufts, Boston College and Boston University, Northeastern, Wake Forest, Rochester, etc.
But…I wouldn’t put Case Western, UMiami, Villanova, Rhodes College, Occidental College, etc. in the “elite” bucket. Not because they’re not excellent, but the same kind of striving sentiment isn’t there.
I don’t really subscribe to the “areas” argument - because undergraduate education is really about the entire thing as a unit and not specific programs or majors. Students only spend about 1/3 of their coursework in their major, and the coursework itself is really only one component of an undergraduate experience. There are so many other factors that come into play that I think narrowing it to just the major simplifies things a bit too much.
To me, “Elite” means someone is impressed. This sort of comes close to “someone will pay $250,000” definition, but is slightly broader. This is also close to @juillet’s comment that the word is more tied up with sentiment than with actual quality. I don’t think that it is a very useful term.
No university is a good fit for the majority of students. Most or nearly all universities are a good fit for someone. Thus I guess at this point I personally am impressed when any one student takes the time and effort and has the good sense to find a university that is a good fit for them.
Acceptance rates are heavily skewed by advertising, and by unpredictable acceptance criteria which encourage a lot of students to apply. Thus to me acceptance rates are a very bad measure of a university.
Regardless of which definition you use, I would say definitely “elite” is not the same as “ivy league”. I work in high tech, where the top universities on the most part are not in the ivy league, and where there are a very large number of very good universities that can lead to a very good job.
CollegeConfidential has its own list of Elite Colleges. Just click on “Discuss and Interact” and then “Colleges and Universities” or “Ivy League.” In my home state of Virginia, UVA and Washington & Lee made the cut. William & Mary did not.
“Elite” is the college my kid got into.
“Good” is the college your kid got into.
“Unacceptable” is the college their kids got into.
:))
My defintion is simple
College or prep school that is needblind, give you admission without looking if you can pay, they are not many colleges or high school that can do so; needaware is just a notch below that
Colleges which are need-blind for individual applicants are not necessarily so when designing their admissions criteria, since they have financial aid budgets to meet. Changing admissions criteria can increase or decrease the expected financial aid needed by the incoming class as a whole by making it more or less likely that high-financial-need applicants will be admitted.
@ucbalumnus
Well colleges may changes their criterion, but in our case we got >$750,000 in need based aid from one elite prep school (for three kids) and $500,000 from a college ( for two kids), and we were not the only game in town, there were many many kids and parent is same situations
Somewhere in there, you need a qualifier, something like, “and meets 100% need.” NYU would fit the first definition, but, not the second.
You said it far better, yay; yes add meets 100% need
You are an elite school if:
- You meet full financial need.
- You have a high full pay percentage (maybe 40% or more).
- You have a high yield on admissions offers (maybe 40% or more).
Those criteria don’t neatly work for state schools though.
I disagree with this definition as an institution which could attract students/parents to be full pay doesn’t necessarily mean the student body on average or the programs offered are necessarily elite.
My definition is focused on the quality(academic rigor/strengths) of programs/undergrad experience.
It also varies by major/program as most of the Ivies with 3 exceptions(Cornell, Columbia, Princeton) wouldn’t be considered elites in the fields of engineering/CS by most engineering/CS/tech employers or colleagues I know of/interacted with whereas schools like UIUC, UMich, Georgia Tech, UW-Seattle, etc would be.
And a few schools not considered “as elite” as the Ivies by some such as Berkeley or CMU would tower over even the 3 Ivy exceptions. One good illustration of this was how most HS classmates in my day or relatives within the last 2-3 years would overwhelmingly choose CMU or Berkeley for engineering/CS over the Ivies…including the 3 Ivy exceptions because their engineering/CS strengths are much more elite not only in their eyes, but to those of many competitive employers in those fields.
Also, sometimes this could be regional. For instance, I found whether NYU with the exception of Tisch or Stern is considered elite or even borderline is inversely proportional to one’s proximity to the NYC area and familiarity with the college itself…similar to how some observations some folks made about Rutgers…cept I find most NJ residents and some Rutgers students seriously underrate it.
While NYU would definitely be elite if the criteria was solely/mostly based on marketing hype* by the institution’s PR/marketing departments which leads parents/students to pay $250k like the Pied Piper was effective in luring unsuspecting children, it wouldn’t be by my definition…especially back when I was applying to colleges in the mid-late '90s.
And it certainly wouldn’t have met that definition of one went by admissions selectivity/stats of admitted students considering over 1/3 of my HS graduating class was accepted to NYU Stern/CAS…and the vast majority of them had GPAs and SAT scores which placed them in the middle-bottom of our graduating class.
Ironically, by that standard, UWisc-Madison would be considered more elite in comparison as while they also accepted students from the middle-bottom of the class by GPA standards, they had a higher minimal standards for SAT scores…so many who didn’t make the cut there ended up at NYU or similar/lower-tiered schools. Also, many of UWisc departments/programs were much stronger than most of NYUs back then.
- I graduated HS right around the time NYU was in the midst of implementing the mass marketing/PR campaign which brought great PR driven dividends by the early-mid '00s.
I think the elite is the very top of the top tier. It’s those schools that you would be shocked someone turned down, except for financial reasons or for another member of the group. For me, that would be HYPSMOBC: Harvard Yale Princeton Stanford MIT Oxford Berkeley Cambridge.
And even this could vary depending on one’s intended major. For instance, when we found one HS classmate turned down admission to MIT to attend Harvard as an engineering major, we all thought she was nuts to do so considering Harvard’s engineering program wasn’t anywhere near MIT’s league…or those of schools like Georgia Tech, UIUC, UMich, etc.
Incidentally, she later voiced her regrets over that decision later on in her undergrad career and said if she had to do it over again, she would have taken that admission to MIT. This was only confirmed when she attended Stanford for her engineering Masters.