<p>@UCBChemEGrad </p>
<p>If you go to UCLA’s Wikipedia page and click on “UCLA Blue,” it takes you to this page:</p>
<p><a href=“UCLA Blue - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCLA_Blue</a></p>
<p>Now go to Berkeley’s Wikipedia page and click on “Berkeley Blue.” Oh right. There’s that originality:</p>
<p><a href=“Yale Blue - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Blue</a></p>
<p>At least they’re the primary users of their primary color. :P</p>
<p>^ Touche. However, UCLA has a habit of making their blue progressively darker and closer to Berkeley’s “Yale Blue”.<br>
Powder blue became “UCLA blue” in 2004…Adidas helped make up “True Blue” and midnight blue “LA Night” uniforms were introduced a year ago…</p>
<p>I mean, no one’s ever heard of Uclanium.</p>
<p>I thought they’d abandoned navy blue in 2004 along with powder blue. Didn’t know about midnight blue, though.</p>
<p>It doesn’t </p>
<p>Schools with the largest and strongest alumni networks are usually the most prestigious btw. Just saying</p>
<p>College names are like car brands, they say something about you. It’s not necessarily the truth, but they are both shorthand for success and quality. For example, you can succeed out of many colleges in life, just like any car can get you where you want to go - but a car, and a college degree, can also do more than provide the basics. A car, especially the right car, can let a guy date a much prettier girl, as opposed to a generic female. So too can getting a degree from the right school attract certain high class companies that only want to “date” graduates with the right brand of degree, as opposed to just getting a job at any company.</p>
<p>Just like a Ferrari makes it a lot easier to date top models and actresses, so too does the Wharton degree get you into top Wall Street firms. Neither the Ferrari nor the Wharton degree guarantee you’ll succeed, but you’ll have a much easier time pursuing those goals than if all you had was a Dodge Neon or a business degree from SEMO.</p>
<p>The name can matter if it will help you get the job you want.</p>
<p>For Happykid’s career and target job market, the institutions that are most likely to help someone get a job are local community colleges and public universities. Not one of the HYPSM level institutions that many people get excited about here at CC would do her one bit of good.</p>
<p>So, think about your own career goals. What colleges and universities did the people who have those jobs graduate from? Did they even go to college anywhere at all?</p>
<p>It’s signaling and also networking. For instance, having HYPSM (and also prolly schools like Columbia, Chicago, Penn, etc.) on you resume indicates to employers that 1) You were good enough to get accepted and 2) You were able to compete with “the big boys” academically if your GPA is good or great. Also, alumni are partial to their school, and at top-notch schools, top companies with lots of these alumni will be more willing to recruit at the school. </p>
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<p>That logic is somewhat simplistic and naive. </p>
<p>In theory, yes, the most selective schools tend to attract the “better” professors (however you want to define that). However, to say that the graduates will have “lots of opportunities” is misleading… “top school” grads tend to have <em>different</em> doors open for them, rather than <em>more</em> doors. What you don’t often hear is that while some doors open for these “top school” grads, many other doors may actually close! Believe it or not, some businesses see these grads as over-demanding and/or over-qualified, and as such, prefer grads from non-elite schools. Corporate culture has something to do with this, as does economics (if a company can’t afford to pay an ivy grad $90k, they will pay the high performing state school grad $75k, and the job will still get done). </p>
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<p>This is a very generic statement, and not always true. Would you say that a Harvard engineering grad knows more about his/her field than a grad from Purdue (an engineering powerhouse)? At best, I would say it’s a tie, at worst, the Purdue grad knows a lot more. Harvard is not an engineering school.</p>
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<p>No doubt that many go into these schools for the exclusivity. Is that really important though? That’s entirely subjective IMO.</p>
<p>“Insane” stats profiles doesn’t mean the smartest students. Selectivity/a low acceptance rate also doesn’t translate to automatic intelligence. And a Rice or Carnegie Mellon graduated could work at Goldman Sachs. I have at least one friend from my mid-ranked undergrad who works at Goldman Sachs (and my freshman roommate works at JPMorganChase; another friend worked at Merrill Lynch). The recruiting of the top firms is limited to well-reputed schools, but the range of well-reputed is wider than people thin it is.</p>
<p>Big name schools do draw good researchers. Whether or not those professors are the best educators is up for debate. And there’s no evidence that a person would be offered a higher salary for the same job from a top-ranked school than they would be from a lower-ranked school. In fact, many CC parents who hire have said that people are paid the same salary regardless of name. Also, the best schools do not necessarily have small class sizes, especially when Berkeley and UCLA have been listed.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>I’m not saying that prestige isn’t important, but I think some of the reasons that have been listed so far aren’t at all tied to prestige. Basically prestige is important because some of the universities with it have duly earned their prestige. It’s because they have excellent research going on at their institutions (which may be a draw for some research-oriented students); because they have tons of money, great facilities and resources, millions of holdings in their libraries, strong alumni networks, and good career services/recruiting efforts.</p>
<p>But, OP has a point. Cornell is far more well-known than Rice for a variety of reasons, but a Rice student could be just as successful. Most people won’t have heard of Harvey Mudd, but the STEM world knows about it. And after your first job, your alma mater becomes less important anyway.</p>
<p>I would argue, however, that “average starting salaries of graduates” is not at all the “most important factor.” Like, let’s say that a hypothetical university graduates 68% of its students in 6 years and the ones who do graduate come from wealthier families and so their average starting salary is $70,000 - awesome, except that you stand a too-large change of not graduating. I’d much rather go to a school that graduates 98% of its students with a starting salary of $50,000. Also, let’s be frank, not all college grads are concerned with making an above-average salary. Although a few grads in a few fields will make a lot, the average starting salary in the majority of fields for new college grads is around $30,000.</p>
<p>@fractalmstr Harvard isn’t the big name when it comes to engineering, though. I’ve heard of Purdue Engineering much more than I’ve heard of Harvard Engineering because Harvard seems to be much more solid in other fields like pure sciences and business. MIT and Caltech are definitely better comparisons.</p>
<p>@dividerofzero Yes, good point. Even so, if you were to look at the curriculum offered at Purdue vs MIT and Caltech, you would see that all of these schools offer virtually the same courses (perhaps structured differently, but pretty much the same end result), at nearly the same depth. Granted, MIT and Caltech certainly have an edge when it comes to research, which is great for grad school, but at the undergraduate level, there really isn’t much of a difference between these schools and Purdue. </p>
<p>@fractalmstr True, and MIT has OpenCourseWare + there’s a ton of good courses on Coursera and edX. Curriculum itself isn’t where the difference exists- although, ofc, there are differences in homework and finals but that’s on a professor-by-professor basis.</p>
<p>The name itself only affects the student body + employer perceptions in certain careers. When it comes to STEM, I agree that there’s little to no difference between schools.</p>
<p>Although I don’t have any numbers to back it up, I would imagine that people who major in engineering at Harvard do so more as a pre-professional track into medicine or patent law than say Purdue, where most of the grads go on to pursue engineering as a profession.</p>