<p>I got this from another thread written by a Dartmouth admit:</p>
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<p>Think about it this way (this is how it’s been explained to me) Many times people end up getting more “ahead” in their fields simply from going to a private university than a large state school with certain great programs. </p>
<p>I’ll give you a great example: The University of Arizona versus Dartmouth. Pretty much anyone can get into U of A, and it has a pretty good (not great) linguistics department. However, only the best of the best get into Dartmouth and thus, its linguistics department as well. Its linguistics department probably isn’t all that great. The fact that one got into Dartmouth is amazing, and the sheer prestige of Dartmouth obviously helps. </p>
<p>Also, we can’t forget about applying to state schools OOS. For example, using the linguistics thing again, UCLA’s linguistics department is amazing, but I know that most likely, I will not get that much aid simply by being an OOS resident. Which is worse: 25k plus no aid or 35k plus aid? Honestly, if I were a California resident, I’m probably better off just going to UCLA or UC Berkeley, but since I come from Arizona, which doesn’t have the greatest colleges, I might as well apply to some of the more prestigious and costly universities.</p>
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<p>I don’t know if this kind of mindset actually pervades only amongst students in the US or also applies to international students (for US students, you really can’t tell by just what they say! I feel that they pretend tradition and selectivity don’t matter, but most are way more likely to attend Dartmouth when they were cross-admitted to schools like Johns Hopkins, regardless of their major)</p>
<p>But if you’re an international student, especially from Asia or Eastern Europe, be ware of this mindset of pursuing for prestige, if you’re deciding between a top undergraduate program and a top school overall with a lagging undergraduate focus.</p>
<p>If it’s likely that you’re going back to your home country after graduation, then you’d better look deeply into the rankings. </p>
<p>Otherwise, there is absolutely no way to tell whether you were smarter than your friend just because you went to somewhere like Dartmouth and your friend went to Beijing University or Delhi University.</p>
<p>On the contrary, you will definitely be ridiculed for spending so much money on a school ranked 65th and 200th internationally in terms of research and so on, while Beijing was in the 50s range and was much cheaper. They will try to tell you that you actually fled from your home country for the “I got my degree from the US” thing and that the college you attended sucked.</p>
<p>Rankings matter, not because they are true, but because they talk. And they talk to international students, not students in the US, because students in the US don’t care about or don’t believe them (their information comes from other sources).</p>