Many many kids go to somewhat “less prestigious” schools where they have merit scholarships that make the school affordable, or end up at state schools rather than bigger name private schools.
The best ways to help with is to: 1) do great in college in terms of courses taken and grades; 2) get involved in activities, internships, research work that can help set you apart from the crowd; and 3) note the merit scholarship on the resume (ex. Presidential Scholar or whatever it is called).
And FWIW Fairfield is a fine school where your D can get a great education and get where she wants to go in life.
I agree 100% with what @blossom and @doschicos said, but I want to point out that there are some very common ways of doing something exactly like what the OP suggests.
There are tons of resumes out there that make clear the person went to East Podunk State Honors College, where she was a Thurston Howell III Scholar and won the Bill and Merida Goats Prize for best honors project (in animal husbandry). Employers (and everyone else) probably have no precise idea what each of those things means. So what? The message getting communicated pretty effectively is that this person was way special for that institution and you shouldn’t lump her in with whatever you think the average is there.
If you care about the problem posed by the OP, you should value those kinds of markers and opportunities.
There is a jest that well illustrates the absurdity of this issue. It goes: Harvard Law grads spend their entire lives dreading being asked how come they didn’t make it into Yale Law. Bottom line is that no matter how prestigious a school, there is always something more prestigious (except, apparently, for Yale Law, LOL) so just don’t sweat it.
TDY- if you attended Yale law and did not clerk for a Federal judge after graduating, you likely graduated near the bottom of your class. If you clerked for a District judge and not an Appellate judge, you were obviously less “prestigious” as a hire than your classmates.
I hire interns, and I have been paying attention to the scholarships listed. The best engineer I hired had a full ride at Clemson. That told me he was an MIT caliber scientist who needed merit to go to college.
That’s not entirely true, blossom, There are always some District Court judges who equal or exceed the prestige of most Court of Appeals judges, and even a few (gasp!) state court judges who confer prestige.
It also helps to know that traditionally being Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal means your peers think you are nice and good at doing boring things but not necessarily very interesting, while being President of the Harvard Law Review means that you won a kind of brutal intellectual Thunderdome cage match elimination tournament, although there still may be one or two other people in your year whom everyone considers smarter than you.
And of course not every Supreme Court Justice is considered equal . . .
My father was disappointed in me until the day he died, because I couldn’t get into Notre Dame. Well, he was disappointed in me for lots of reasons, but that was a big one. I’m trying hard to avoid that with my daughter; she’s going to a “less prestigious” school for financial reasons. (Maybe if I’d gone to ND, we could have afforded the other school . . . )
Really, though, I’ve never been very interested in prestige; I can proudly state that I was kicked off the Southern Illinois University Law Journal for slacking off. (Or am I bragging about being selected in the first place? )
JHS, my post was tongue in cheek… of course there are gradations of “prestige” within the court system, within the DA’s offices, EDNY vs. SDNY for prosecutors, etc and my post was intended in no way to disparage ANY form of public service in the judiciary. What I was trying to communicate is how absurd it is to lead your life watching the scoreboard… and somehow trying to apologize for landing up on the 9th Circuit vs. the 2nd Circuit…
Just say you got into HYPSM but didn’t go to save money; that might get you the job if you have good grades. IMO, prestige matters for only top 20 or even fewer colleges. When I say “prestige matters”, I mean the effect the graduation certificate from that school would have on potential employers depending on the region. There are only few schools which would carry prestige across all regions of USA and the world. What I mean to say is I don’t see that big difference in prestige between a school ranked 50 and a school ranked 100.
I also interviewed potential employees to work for me in my company. Although a college name would help the person get an interview, it really comes down to how I perceived their ability and character in all aspects and then the actual work performance.
Of course, blossom. I was trying to answer you in kind, and at an even sillier level of refinement.
To my eternal shame, at one point or another I knew things like how to weigh Rhodes vs. Marshall, before and after Rhodes went co-ed, and who were so smart they didn’t need to be on the Harvard Law Review.
Somewhere in the resume you could put “Academic Achievements,” and list scholarships, class rank, GPA, and even SAT/ACT scores. It would be a little odd, but it would be a quick & easy way to say, “Although I went to Southeast Baloney Tech, I had the qualifications to go to Oxford.”
Op, I wholeheartedly agree with the advice being given to you here!
Just want to add- in my experience, prestige of the school opens the door a bit easier with regards to securing top internships while in school. For example, older son’s NYC IB internship had Villanova Business School interns but none from Fairfield…
This isn’t an insurmountable problem though.
Find out the algorithm that gets your Ds resume into the interview pile (as most resumes are computer read first round these days). Follow the advice given above about maximizing honors/ research opportunities/outside scholarships in order to stand out in her chosen field. Once she gets her foot in the door for the interview, her story can show that she has the character and ability to thrive among the interns from more prestigious schools.
Son has been to many early insight programs from IBs and they all have said its important in the interview to have an organic story about your interests rather than just achievements listed on resume … so at this point she could highlight the due to financial constraints chose x school but have maximized opportunities in pursuit of interests story…
BTW, I agree with the other comments that you can get a rigorous education by applying yourself at the college you attend. But if you are looking for a signifier - those merit scholarships count.
WRT specifically to Villanova and Fairfield, IMHO the only reason Villanova is better known than Fairfield is due to winning the NCAA basketball title 30 years ago and then again last year. Coincidentally, their first champion win occurred the year I was applying to college and their second win the same yearD17 was applying to college (obviously, this past fall). I happened to apply to Villanova but not due to that. I was told during my interview that they were being very selective because “everyone wants to go here now b/c of our basketball win.” My visit did not leave a very good impression due to that and a few other things. My father was secretly pleased he told me later b/c I ended up at Jesuit university not too far from Fairfield (My father highly regards the Jesuits having been educated by them himself). I actually spent several weekends at Fairfield visiting friends and attending games when our schools played each other. In terms of prestige, I personally don’t think Villanova has an edge over Fairfield. More popular, yes, but not more prestigious.
I keep telling my own daughter, it’s not where you go but what you make of your college years that is important - coursework, research, internships, etc. Ever heard of Mercyhurst? I hadn’t until my niece decided to go there. When my husband asked where she was going, he immediately recognized Mercyhurst - he has actually hired several graduates from their Intelligence Studies department. It’s one of the best programs in the country for the work that his company does. It doesn’t matter to him that hardly anyone outside of that part of the country has heard of the school.
JHS- and to my eternal shame, during the brief period when I was recruiting lawyers at a law firm, I had to run decision meetings where we debated whether working on NYU’s Law and Liberty journal (so the candidate clearly hadn’t made law review) outgunned making Law Review at Duke (a lesser ranked law school but clearly a more prestigious journal).
I can tell you that a year ago I didn’t know the difference between Xavier and Wiliams, and would have assumed Xavier was probably more prestigious since I had at least heard of it. I am reasonably sure that 95% of the educated professional people in my town and probably state have never heard of Williams (deep into flyover country).
This is actually a issue with my son, I think if he can get in Williams would be a perfect fit for him. He kind of agrees but also thinks that all the local employers and everyone he knows personally will think of Williams as being no different than going to a directional state school, just further away and more expensive. I’ve told him that Wall Street, Apple and the Ivy League grad schools all know who Williams is, who cares what your knucklehead buddies think? The answer is of course that HE cares. Oh well, it’s a work in progress. And he probably could go to the local state school for free, so who knows.
All the worrying about the various shades of prestigiosity gray are what economists call a “signaling device.” There’s lots of them – degrees, awards, GPAs, honors, clerkships, scholarships, honors colleges, etc. etc. etc.
How well the signal works in a particular context depends on a lot of factors. Having a full scholarship and being #1 in your class from Villanova is a very good signal – that person clearly could have been a solid graduate from an Ivy.
That Nova credential probably won’t get you a job at Goldman Sachs over a mid-class Harvard graduate. But more than likely it will do a much better job getting you into Harvard Law School.
My wife (who went to a meh college and then very well at a top ten law school) does periodically point out to me (and select others) that she did in fact get into YLS (which I did not). She’s been tempted over the years to drop that little detail on the bottom of her resume…
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