<p>I think Julliard is very prestigious. Most people first think of it when they think of performing arts.</p>
<p>^ I agree with you, Alex. I, too, think Julliard is quite prestigious. But that’s becuase we both heard of it. But, in general, it cannot be more prestigious than Harvard. Most people don’t know what it is or where it is.</p>
<p>^^^^ If you value the respect that scholars/academic people have for a school (which is, after all, a significant factor in the USNWR rankings), then presumably you respect scholars/academic people themselves. And the small schools that purely concentrate on undergraduate education produce, on a per capita basis, more of those people. The ones you mention are very selective (as selective as any but the top 3 or 4 universities). They have had many alumni occupying high seats of well-established organizations or government (or who were in other respects famous or distinguished.)</p>
<p>[List</a> of Amherst College people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amherst_College_people]List”>List of Amherst College people - Wikipedia)
[List</a> of Williams College people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Williams_College_people]List”>List of Williams College people - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>But the general public is generally uninformed and they don’t particularly care about the subject in the first place. When the general public is asked about prestigious colleges, they toss out HYPSM and then their local universities. They don’t KNOW enough to make a determination as to what is quality and what isn’t, so they fall back on familiarity. Which is influenced heavily by sports. So why is awareness among the general public so important to you, RML? I can only conclude it’s because you feel better when the drycleaner recognizes your sweatshirt. </p>
<p>Are Andover and Phillips Exeter not prestigious since very few adults know what they are?</p>
<p>Yield rates are NOT an indicator of prestige. Not only are they influenced by financial aid, weather and other factors, they are manifestations of what other people do, and what other people do is, one more time, not what defines prestige. If you gave most Americans the choice between a trip to Disney and a trip to St Petersburg focusing on the culture, they’d choose Disney. If you gave most Americans the choice between Ohio State and Swarthmore, they’d choose Ohio State because football sounds like fun and what’s this Swarthmore place anyway? If you gave most Americans a years worth of free meals at Bennigans or one meal at French Laundry they’d choose Bennigans. </p>
<p>The taste of the masses is nothing to aspire to, RML.</p>
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<p>A better indicator is yield/admit_rate. Here are the numbers for HYPSM for last year.</p>
<p>Yield/Admit_rate</p>
<p>10.2, Harvard
8.9, Yale
8.7, Stanford
6.0, MIT
5.8, Princeton</p>
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If it attracts a better class of students, why not?</p>
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Sure, why not? They’re better in at least that respect.</p>
<p>Now, of course, if you dig a bit deeper, and use more complex criteria on what the “best” students are, then maybe Harvard comes out on top, and some of the highest-scoring students don’t look like the best.</p>
<p>But it seems to me that most people get that “prestige” (or reputation) only has meaning in the context of some defined group of people. If you define the group as everybody in the world, you get one answer, if you define it as people with the power to hire college graduates, you get a different answer, and if you narrow it to people with the power to hire mechanical engineers, you will get another answer. And there are different kinds of prestige hounds–some would rather go to Harvard, because everybody knows Harvard–others would rather go to Amherst, in part because not just everybody knows Amherst.</p>
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<p>No one is disputing that schools like Caltech and Pomona can attract “highly able” students (as defined by their SAT scores). The point is whether or not Caltech and Pomona are more prestigious than Harvard because they have higher SATs. Of course not.</p>
<p>Universities with uber prestige (of which Harvard is the best example) define it on their own terms. Harvard probably rejects more perfect SAT scorers than it accepts. Less prestigious schools such as Caltech and Pomona cannot afford to do this because, to a large extent, they derive their prestige from their high SAT profiles. That is what they are known for, especially in the case of Caltech. Harvard’s prestige, however, is self-sufficient.</p>
<p>If Harvard wanted to have the highest SATs in the land, it could easily do so. But it chooses not to and instead goes with a more “holistic” approach. Uber prestigious universities like Harvard (Stanford, Yale, etc.), with their enormous appeal due to name recognition alone, would have no trouble enrolling higher SAT scorers if they chose. By not choosing to do so, they are essentially setting the standard for who are the “best” students. It is much more prestigious to define the “best” students by your own criteria than those of others (i.e. SAT scores). </p>
<p>Here is an article excerpt about a perfect SAT (& ACT) student who couldn’t make the cut at H(YPSM), but was apparently good enough for Caltech:</p>
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<p>Yes, but the more prestigious universities are defined as such in more contexts and by more defined groups of people. Universal prestige is by definition greater than prestige in only particular settings by particular people.</p>
<p>dimsum, I think there is a chicken and egg issue with prestige. Is it prestige that draws the best students, or is it having the best students that generates prestige? Let’s put aside Harvard for a minute and think about schools that have gained or lost prestige. The prime example, I think, is Wash U. 30 years ago, it was virtually unknown outside its area, and it certainly didn’t have much of a national rep. Now, it’s widely seen as a top school, comparable to places like Chicago, Northwestern, etc. How did that happen? My understanding is that it largely happened thanks to aggressive marketing of the school to top students nationwide. I don’t know if they also raised their academic profile by hiring more noted profs–I’d be curious.
I’ll throw in another factor that may not be as obvious to folks on CC–having a successful athletic program will make a lot of people think that the school is also academically prestigious, just because it makes it more famous.
I agree that if you are looking at some kind of generalized prestige, that Harvard is more prestigious than Caltech. But if you are asking people doing the hiring at engineering firms, or recruiting grad students in engineering, I think it would be a different story. It’s all relative.</p>
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<p>What silly and irrelevant analogies! The yield rates of top colleges are indeed fair indicators of prestige. Their admits are by definition elite and are hardly “most Americans.” The students who choose Harvard over Amherst and Williams or Stanford over Pomona are not the sort of persons who’d choose Bennigan’s over French Laundry. They are highly aware that while all of these schools are prestigious, there are still subtle yet real distinctions. While it may not behoove you to parse out the prestige differences between Yale and Wesleyan, for many students, this is a matter of finely tuned tastes.</p>
<p>
OK, but what does it mean? I was thinking about a poll that the Washingtonian magazine does each year in which readers are asked to rate the best food, services, etc., in the area. When they are asked, for example, to identify the best pizza or hamburger, they will often identify a big chain, like Papa John’s. Now, Papa John has pretty good pizza (in my opinion), but there is much better pizza to be had, and people who really know pizza scoff at the idea that Papa John’s is the best. If you polled Americans and asked them, “What is the finest vacation resort in America?”, I predict that the leading resort mentioned will be Disney World. What does that mean? Similarly, if you polled Americans and asked them, “What college in America provides the finest education to undergraduates?”, the leading vote-getter will be Harvard. But that doesn’t really tell you if Harvard, in fact, gives the best education, because those people aren’t even considering places like Amherst, Pomona, or even Caltech.
So, OK, Harvard has a great reputation. It is, in fact, a great school. But the reality is more complex.</p>
<p>Let me add that I don’t think it’s necessarily nuts to consider prestige in choosing a college. But you should only consider the reputation of the college among people who count for you. So, as I’ve said, if your dream is to get a job in Japan, the rep of your college among people in Japan who might hire you might matter. If you want to be a musician, the rep of Juilliard will matter (although it may not matter as much as your particular teacher). But for whom will everybody be the people who count?</p>
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<p>WashU (like Caltech and Pomona) is a perfect example of why high SATs are necessary but not sufficient for real prestige.</p>
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<p>Harvard, unlike Papa John’s, is prestigious to both the elite and the masses. Papa John’s is only prestigious to the masses. The former has universal prestige, the latter merely particular prestige. Universal prestige is greater than particular prestige.</p>
<p>More schools </p>
<p>Yield/Admit_rate</p>
<p>10.2, Harvard
8.9, Yale
8.7, Stanford
6.0, MIT
5.8, Princeton </p>
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<p>1.3, Chicago
1.1, Northwestern</p>
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But WashU *has *real prestige. Not as much as Harvard, sure, but it has a lot more “universal” prestige than it had 30 years ago. I think it got that prestige by figuring out how to attract top students.</p>
<p>And you’re right, Harvard is prestigious to everybody. But as I’m trying to suggest, prestige to the elites may be better for you, if those elites control your future. The universal prestige of Harvard will not help a Harvard engineering grad going head-to-head with a Caltech grad for an engineering job–especially if it’s on the West Coast.</p>
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<p>I’d say not even as much as other Midwest schools (UChicago, Northwestern) with which it has high cross-admit overlap, despite relatively higher SATs. </p>
<p>My point is that university prestige is a lot more complex than and cannot be reduced to mere SAT profiles. WashU is a fine school that attracts high SAT scorers, but it does not have the cachet of Chicago, let alone Harvard.</p>
<p>I’d be interested if ewho could provide the yield/admit rate ratio for WashU and compare it to that of other schools with similar SAT profiles. My guess is that its prestige is underdetermined by its SATs.</p>
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<p>That’s the thing. Harvard’s universal prestige allows their students and alumni, for the most part, to control their own future. Universal prestige is self-sufficient and self-sustaining, not derivative or dependent on others.</p>
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<p>True, but the few Harvard students who study engineering do not find engineering jobs to be especially prestigious. That’s why most of them parlay their engineering background into more lucrative jobs in finance and consulting and/or end up enrolling at business, law and medical schools.</p>
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Well, here in the DC suburbs, WashU has moved way up the list as a backup to the Ivies. Here, at least, I would say that’s pretty much on a par with Chicago and Northwestern.</p>
<p>I was never really trying to argue that prestige can be reduced to SATs–that was just a shorthand for “quality of students,” which is obviously much more complex. But by any measure, WashU is getting higher quality students than it used to–and that is either a cause or a result of increased prestige for WashU nationwide.</p>
<p>In the meantime, Michigan is more prestigious/impressive than UNC. Can we close this thread now?</p>
<p>I’m not sure how meaningful this whole yield/admit rate measurement and prestige question is or what it actually says, but in case anyone was interested in the data, here it is for the Top 20 schools (kids entering Fall, 2008) and 4 of the top publics (kids entering Fall, 2009). The admit rates fell at almost every one of the privates so their 2009 ratios probably went up. But it’s pretty clear who the winner is (Harvard) and who the least compelling is (U Michigan OOS). </p>
<p>Yield/Admit Rate , College , Yield , Admit Rate</p>
<p>9.57 , Harvard , 76% , 7.9%
7.90 , Yale , 59% , 9.9%
7.48 , Stanford , 68% , 8.6%
5.96 , Columbia , 34% , 17.4%
5.90 , Princeton , 66% , 11.9%
5.56 , MIT , 71% , 9.5%
4.00 , Brown , 63% , 16.9%
3.70 , U Penn , 60% , 10.0%
3.65 , Dartmouth , 38% , 27.9%
2.22 , Cornell , 40% , 22.4%
2.01 , Notre Dame , 49% , 13.5%
1.98 , Caltech , 32% , 26.2%
1.81 , Duke , 30% , 21.7%
1.52 , Rice , 30% , 25.4%
1.44 , Vanderbilt , 46% , 20.7%
1.38 , Wash U , 55% , 13.7%
1.35 , U Chicago , 28% , 26.6%
1.21 , Northwestern , 35% , 23.0%
1.20 , Johns Hopkins , 37% , 25.3%
1.05 , Emory , 54% , 26.7%</p>
<p>1.11 , UC Berkeley OOS , 19.5% , 17.6%
1.11 , U Virginia OOS , 32.9% , 29.7%</p>
<p>1.59 , U North Carolina-All Students , 54.0% , 34%
(UNC does not break out IS/OOSdata, but for OOS, ratio is almost certainly lower) </p>
<p>0.62 , U Michigan OOS , 26.0% , 42.1%</p>