SES status and campus cultural eccentricities are irrelevant when considering whether a given college is academically elite or not.
By your standard, a school like Skidmore would be considered much more elite.
And if someone said that…especially at my public magnet when I attended in the early-mid '90s, you’d likely be dismissed as someone who’d consider schools which academically average/mediocre rich kids dominate to be elite…like NYU CAS. And we’d be wondering what funky drugs were you smoking to believe that.
Coming from a family that needs significant financial aid, and whose pups got it at need-blind admission schools that meet full demonstrated need, which leaves the net cost actually affordable, it never dawned on my pups to apply to any other schools.
In my mind, schools that only give merit aid are simply not elite. They may be terrific options for many students and their families, but the elite schools are those that can afford to be very selective, need blind in admissions, and meet full financial need. I don’t mind when some of them if they play games with ED, and legacy preference, etc. to design their class, because these schools are still meeting full need to a significant number of students, many of whom would have had other options anyway.
“@maya54 so I school ranked 21 or 22 isn’t elite. UCB has been ranked 20 for only 2 or 3 years now. So it’s only been elite for 3 years?”
Obviously there’s some arbitrariness right at the cut off points but the current ranking really do align in the minds of most here with these categories.
The next down is USC which we get many kids into who can’t seem to get any toehold into the top 20.
My guess is that Boston College might have some feeling of being an " exception" but our heavily Jewish student population seems to have little interest in it. (We also haven’t had any top student apply to Notre Dame).
Elite: Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, Duke, Chicago, JHU, Northwestern, & Cal Berkeley.
Very good school: USNews down to about #49 in USNews and not on Elite list.
Good school: USNews from about #50-#90
Note: The above comments are what I think. If your kid is going to college x, I am always going to say that is an excellent school.
So now we have elite, prestigious, very good, really good and good. Is the difference just the angle at which you should hold your nose when talking about your or your kids school?
All the members of my family went to “elite” schools. Two were large public universities. Two were small-medium private colleges (I went to both types). Of course “elite” is a subjective term. Both of my kids are elite kids! To argue otherwise would be picking a fight!
@saillakeerie “So now we have elite, prestigious, very good, really good and good. Is the difference just the angle at which you should hold your nose when talking about your or your kids school?”
For me, I think these are positive comments.
A “Good school” is a school I am very proud say my student attends. These schools have strong students, and excellent resources. A student can get an elite education there, if they are willing to work hard. I am sincerely impressed when a student is attending this type of school.
An elite school is not better for most students. It has to be the right student. In difficult majors these schools challenge students beyond a level / amount of work that is doable by students at most schools. They may not even offer courses like algebra II, trigonometry or precalculus. I would discourage most students from even applying to these schools.
Pomona’s definitely elite considering it’s among the very top LACs I sometimes like to dub with the acronym SWAMP(Swat, Williams, Amherst, Midd, Pomona)…and if an applicant is female…add Wellesley to make it SWWAMP.
“I think we can call them identical from a statistical perspective.”
When debating elite-ness and prestigiosity, no difference is too small to take life/death seriously.
For the 2020 class, Harvard’s YTAR was 15.81. Stanford’s was 18.55.
Which means that based on the recognized CC scale of milliHarvards, Stanford actually scores higher than 1,000 mH. A feat which was previously thought impossible.
Well prestigiosity was always based on CC Chance Me threads and similar metrics - not YTAR or anything based in the real world, in fact. So Harvard still wins. They’re called milliHarvards, after all.
Or maybe @Hunt thinks miilH should become milliS at some point.
this is a silly topic “elite” is something someone says to make themselves seem superior , its nonsense. FACT.
So many different schools have so called “Elite” specialties yet wouldn’t make many overall list. For example VCUARTS is one of the top art/design schools in the country in addition its grad program is ranked #2 in the country behind only Yale#1. Yet the university VCU doesn’t make any “elite” list .
