Building on what @Twoin18 described (100% accurate in my experience/observation as well) - it is literally unbelievable to discover how incredibly hands on schools/professors/programs/administrators are when they’ve ‘anointed’ a student they think can go the distance.
There is a lot of very granular work being done at that point; reading/reviewing applications, on-call availability when needed, opening up networks to the student and making personal introductions, guided course selection and multi-year planning.
This is particularly true of cohort scholarships (such as the one D was in). It is not always the case at some bigger, higher ranking publics, which haven’t felt the need to make an effort. For example it’s well known that UCB and UCLA have underperformed in Rhodes and similar scholarships for many years, and S certainly saw how poor they were in terms of support and prep. Pick carefully if you are interested in these sorts of honors.
Very much aligned. I wasn’t disagreeing with you at all - it was a “yes, and” post, not a “yes, but” post. Just pointing out that it works the same in grad school acceptances.
In STEM or FAANG, it cannot be assumed that any particular letter is necessarily the same as any other particular letter in this respect.
For law, it seems that the college prestige that matters is mainly that of one’s law school, rather than undergraduate.
Wouldn’t the prestige that matters for PhD programs be prestige in major, with a research focus, as seen by the PhD program faculty, not general college prestige?
Yes and a little bit no. So the program is recognized, but in the field they talk about the college. So in CS, it’s of course the CS program at UIUC which has the prestige. However, they will talk about “UIUC”, and, for CS people, the entire university will have some of that aura. If the kid of a CS professor wants to study History at UIUC, the reputation of UIUC in history will be somewhat colored by it’s prestige in CS, especially, if the CS professor is not really familiar with the “prestige ranking” of colleges in history.
It’s a much milder version of what happens with, say, CS at Dartmouth and Brown. People who are not in CS will often assume that, because of the “Ivy prestige” that Ivies are better at every field, and they will consider these colleges to be more “prestigious” for CS than U Washington or UIUC.